Everything at Once is Ours
by zulu-ottawa
Summary: War has a way... In 1939 Mary's son takes rank amongst The Few, and at eighteen his life becomes sorties, dogfights, loss and patience.
1. Dunkirk

_****A/N: This has been in the pipeline for a long time. It's a place we'll likely never get to in canon, so... after much research and agonizing I've decided to tell William Crawley's (or canon George) story as I imagine it. _

* * *

**i**

_We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end._

* * *

_September, 1939_

It became something Mary expected of him, her boy, so shy in his affections except for this one small gesture. At only a few hours old, before she'd known what it really meant, he had wrapped his hand around her thumb and she thought he would learn the name William. By evening he had a different namesake, she an even fiercer love. He became a boy of two years old, sleepy on her shoulder as she carried him upstairs; five, beaming up at Lynch as one of the horses ate a carrot from his palm; ten, pushing Sybbie around the drive on his bicycle; sixteen, realizing the weight a title held. He learned William anyhow, because she couldn't bear to call him by Matthew. It had been a linking thread, their handshake. Now he had not returned to school but instead stood clear across the library from her, that thread fraying and bunching into knots.

"You can't mean it."

"Chamberlain was quite clear," he snapped. He could have a tongue like hers, when he wanted to, his pride and his independent nature getting in the way.

"You just haven't thought, darling," she said desperately.

He turned to look over his shoulder toward her, voice biting. "Well there's not much point idling at Oxford if the country's getting bombed, is there?"

She wondered when he had become so cynical. His fingers drummed loudly against the table he leaned on, louder and louder as she thought of how to respond. It stopped abruptly and he spoke again. "I know you want to say that as the Earl I can't go galavanting into danger, but I just – " His face was no longer angry, but lost, and reverent, and he jammed his hands into his pockets. "It's done now. I have to go," he said quietly.

She could resign to this, she could resign as she had before. In the time it took her to walk over to him he had changed in her eyes, was the eight-year-old she had once found huddled in the wool of a green greatcoat, toy dog in his hands, half-anxious and half in awe, his questions so rapid she could not keep up.

"The RAF..." she whispered.

"A blue-blood in blue," he joked. Then sighed. "Why? Why am I any different than Grandpapa, or my fa – "

"Don't you dare," she hissed, reaching up and tilting his face to look at her. It never failed, how similar the blue of his eyes was, the apology in them, a defiance in the rest of his face that was very much hers. "I won't let you go foolishly," she said, wrapping her fingers around his thumb, and his mouth twitched before he blinked, flitting his gaze past her face. She pursed her lips before continuing. "I treasure you too much."

He tensed again. His shoulders set and he stepped back, into the small library, speaking as he walked away. She registered the words with thick static in her ears, frustration as he pivoted around the pillar and out into the entrance hall. "Maybe I'm sick of being treasured," he said, not wavering, cold, their thread caught in the seam of a slammed door.

* * *

_July, 1939_

_The trees behind them exhaled yet again, and in the temple ruins William breathed in, smoke and hot summer air. The pillar balanced his back, shoulder blades digging into the stone. He leaned his head back and watched Sybbie fold her legs beneath her, bare feet, skirt tucked neatly around them. _

_He laughed when she put a wine bottle between them. "Raiding the cellar?" He turned it in his hands. Bordeaux. "Barrow won't like you."_

"_Then he'll be a hypocrite," she said, grinning. William smiled too, remembering the story Tom had told them._

_He uncorked it. "It's not even breathed," he said with mock disdain._

_The sky burned; he tipped his head to watch the blue fading to the crisp edge of trees, black masses on scorched ground. A breeze rippled the cloth away from his lifted arm, and he squinted, putting his palm up to the sun and splicing his fingers over its brightness. Heat prickled in his hair._

"_William," Sybbie's voice asked. "Have you ever been with anyone?"_

_He straightened his back against the pillar. It was bold, but he was used to her straight-on way of speaking, so he challenged her with his own question. "Have you ever been with Leon?"_

_Sybbie looked at him and blushed. "Once."_

"_What a terrible Catholic you are," he said, smiling._

"_And you say you're C of E but you're a heathen." She took the bottle of claret from him, which he held but had not drank. "Who was she?"_

_He was suddenly shy, running a hand through his hair and looking back to where the house wavered behind a pane of heat. "Hannah Brayburn," he said eventually._

"_From St. Hugh's?" Her eyes widened. "When?"_

_The bottle clanked on stone as she set it down too heavily._

"_Eights Week," he said, flicking ash into the grass. "Eric, her brother, rows for Trinity as well and she was there watching... I'd met her once before, at the start of Michaelmas term. She was clingy with Eric then, but he said she was keen on me." He gave an embarrassed smile. "Nothing happened until she seduced me after we won."_

"_I'm sure the boathouse is very romantic," Sybbie said wryly._

"_Not quite."_

_They'd cycled back from the Isis, and he remembered sun warming where his shirt clung to him, wet along his neck from his hair. A feeling of summer in the clatter of bicycle tires on slates, the thin hot smell of stone and pollen, the cool shadow at the top of the attic stairs. And his nerves only began when the door to his rooms shut, when they were there alone between eaves in an eddy of dust moats, and through the open window he could hear students in the quad singing taunts across to Balliol. Then she had kissed him and the instincts in touch overtook all sound. _

_It all felt very far away, here at Downton._

"_To Hannah," Sybbie said._

_He lifted the bottle, its green-edged glass warping half his periphery. "To Leon."_

"_To the loves of '39."_

* * *

"William?" Isobel knocked on the door, light and even, and waited for an answer.

"Come in."

She found him curled up, face to the windows, flipping a small piece of paper in his hand. The movement stilled as the door thumped shut. Isobel was reminded of Mary, who had that same protective gesture, the same way of sometimes holding her self arced in.

"Mama sent you to talk to me, didn't she?" William asked, head tilted over his shoulder, defeat clear in his voice. Isobel came around the bed and sat on its edge.

"Do you want to talk?" She looked down at his hand curved under his cheek, face solemn. William blinked, flattening his palm over what she could now see was a photograph concealed against the bedspread. She watched him blink again, more rapidly, then his mouth pull down and his face tilt into the pillow. She put her hand to the back of his head, to the fine ends of dark brown hair there.

"You're scared," she murmured, feeling William nod, breath hitching, the line of his shoulder blade pulling against his shirt's fabric and then away, a clean shadow on the white. He turned his face up but kept his eyes down. "Your father never said it," she started. "But he was terrified. It's a different war, this one, I know, and you'll be in the air, but I think..." She smiled at William meeting her gaze hesitantly, a tear trapped in the sleepless-smudged skin between his eye and nose. Her thumb wiped it away. "I think it's still true that while training may not prepare you for everything, a picture from home and some prayers can get you through."

William stayed still, focussed on his fingers picking at a stray thread in the bed linen, his breath calming. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed, corners of his mouth twitching up with it, and Isobel thought of the boy she'd known for eighteen years, the child that was sometimes so like her own son in the smallest movements, and it was a wonder to her that some things could come through even from a person he had never met. William gave that exact same self-deprecating smile at times, where his bottom lip tensed against his top, hands held behind his back. He was taller. His hair was dark but just as untameable. She remembered combing it when he was young, the slight curl it made, a kink in the brush lines. He was so much Mary too, in the grace of him. Yet he was entirely himself.

She reached down and slid the photograph from under William's palm. The wedding, March 1920. Isobel took a steadying breath. "You keep that close," she said, handing it back. "Breast pocket of your uniform." She ran her hand over William's hair again. "We'll worry, but we're all on your side," she whispered. "All of us."

* * *

_October, 1938_

_Eric Brayburn was buoyant, flaxen, never at fault. He seemed to embody Oxford's stone. He smoked on her pathways and cycled her streets and could navigate her river's heart without eyes. A second year medical student who was likely to get a First, it had been rowing that befriended them. _

"_Concentrate," William said, scanning the drawings of Gray's. He squinted at a colour-coded image of the inner skull. "Eminentia_ _arcuata_,_" he said, tripping over the vowels. The pages fluttered with a breeze and he pressed his fingers to its edge._

_Eric flopped back onto the grass. "A hollow within the subarcuate fossa," he said to the sky, stretching his arms above his head. "It houses arteries for cochlear blood supply."_

_William tilted his head and looked up. "I haven't a clue what you just said, but I'll assume it's right?"_

_Eric shifted on his elbows to glare at him."Well I couldn't tell you when Agincourt was, so next question," he said, scrubbing a hand through his hair._

"_1415," William murmured. He flipped the page, smiling at Eric's exasperated sigh. "Zygomatic," he read, liking the way the word felt on his tongue, the neat print of it over a flare of cheekbone in the skull's grinning profile._

"_Have a secret language now, do you?" _

_Eric tilted his head back toward the path at the voice, and William followed his gaze to a girl pushing a bicycle past the walled gardens, the tyres' tread slowing when she steered onto grass. Eric groaned. "My sister," he muttered. "Hello, Hannah," he said more amiably when she neared. He sat up. "Bonjour, ma soeur," he called in a sing-song._

"_You've improved," she said happily. She tipped her bicycle onto the grass behind Eric's back and sat beside him, balancing her hand on his shoulder for a moment as she crossed her trousered legs. "Mon frère," she said, kissing his cheek. "Do introduce me." She glanced across to William._

_She had the look of easy confidence, carried in long limbs, and he thought that if they were stood side by side she would just match his height. She smiled across the few feet between them, holding the polished top of one shoe in her hand and extending the other hand out to him."Hannah Brayburn," she said. "Reading French and Classics." It was how people introduced themselves here, he'd learnt; you were not a whole person without your attached credentials._

_He took her hand. Cool, slender. "William Crawley. History." She drew her hand away, resting it palm up on her knee, blouse fine about her wrist and bright white against the dark wool of her trousers. She turned her head to passersby and there was red within her hair, delicate curls clipped aside. Auburn to her brother's ashen blond, but they had the same dark eyes, a similar face shape._

_Eric leaned to nudge his shoulder against hers. "He's neglected to tell you there's a Lordship attached to that name," he murmured._

_William rolled his eyes and Hannah laughed. "Modesty is an attractive quality, Eric," she said._

* * *

_June 2, 1940_

The clock had chimed midnight and there was still light in the library. Cora heard the noise of static before she entered the room, and knew where Mary would be. She was sat in a wing back in the corner of the small library, fire nearly gone as Cora walked across the larger room. She wondered what anxieties had kept her up this late again. She supposed it was obvious.

"Mary, you can't keep sitting vigil like this." She leaned across to flick the wireless off, newsmen having signed off for the night, and Mary's eyes opened at the silence.

"The King's told us to pray," she murmured. She kept her voice to a whisper. "It's worse, when it's so close. I imagine him over France in that flimsy..." She bit her lip. "The evacuation. He needs to come back too."

William was not here, but Cora knew there were days Mary hoped she heard his arrival, Barrow announcing him at the door, and knew that with William's stride into the room it was like Matthew was returned with him, voice an unbidden memory, so alike on certain words that she had to keep her eyes fixed on her son's face to be sure.

Cora smiled wearily and stood. "Try to get some sleep, darling." Mary watched her with a wary look, mingled with sadness, glassy eyes. Her hand hovered as though to catch her mother's, then dropped away.

"Do you wish Papa was still here?" she asked.

Cora turned back with shoulders bowed. "Not for this," she said.

* * *

_June 4, 1940_

London was not the same as it had been, eerily still and dark. As William walked through St. Johns Wood toward Edith's house the blacked out streets allowed his exhaustion to settle in. Everything had become grey, the blue-tint smudges of a late dusk still lingering, and without streetlamps he could see a thin ravine of stars between the buildings. Car windows caught his reflection. His boots clicked. He saw no-one. It made him feel clandestine until the oblong of yellow light that spilled from Edith's open door jolted him into alertness, her shocked face silhouetted against the jamb. He ducked in and shut the door as quickly as he could. "No trains home this late," he said by way of apology.

Edith took his still-gloved hands. "Does your mother know you're back?"

"No."

"Telephone her," she urged, tears shimmering in her eyes. He wondered just what they knew, thought, had been told. Her voice caught. "Telephone her now."

He did, and on hearing the line click and Barrow's voice, he forced himself into jollity, stretched thin by the long pause waiting for his mother's voice. It came, smooth and cool and with a tremor beneath its composure; he had the feeling of being a boy again, in nursery, her hand on his forehead. He shut his eyes to better remember it. "He's fine," he heard her relay, Cora's voice indistinct below it. Their relief caused the past week, wound tight in him, to loosen, knowing he wasn't fine at all, but that there was enough for them to cling to in that single word. He felt dizzy when he hung up, had a vague thought that he should eat, and stood propped up against the wall for a moment before he went to find Edith.

* * *

_May, 1939_

"_Four, you're off time," Eric shouted down the boat. "Regan, pace up!"_

"_They're doing damn well," William shot back at him. Sun was straining through the clouds, and he squinted forward, watching the bright silver of the river, the boats skating towards them with their thin spindles of oar flashing as they moved. His shoulders ached, palms beginning to feel blisters. He counted another lungful of air and exhaled on the backstroke._

"_Oriel on port side," Regan said from the cox. The other college's navy and white stripes came into view, blades inching past each other but not touching. "Thank God," he heard Eric say. The week's earlier bumps meant this race couldn't have any._

"_Power 20," Regan yelled to get clear of Oriel's sweep._

_The water offered little resistance, and William wasn't aware of the crowds or the noise but only the shunt of the sweep, each stroke of the six people in front of him, knowing Eric was being watchful behind him, picking up on every twitch and wrong catch._

"_Four!" Eric said again tersely. "Over-reaching, Paine."_

_William let out a breathy laugh. Far up the river the crowd was thickening, the purple and white of Merton edging on their stern. But somehow they kept ahead, the flag was waved, line crossed, and William's focus shifted. He stopped counting breaths and measuring the steer of the boat, and became aware of Eric cheering behind him, the other oars dragging in the water as each eight let his arms relax. Whistles and applause skipped over the river. The boat slowed, drifted, hitting a patch of shade where the sudden coolness was a shock. Eric was flicking water at him from the bow. "Wake up," he said. William twisted to look at him, his infectious grin. "We've only bloody won it." His eyes were squinting, cheerful, an announcer's voice sounding above his. "Did you see we missed Merton bumping us out by a hair?"_

_William felt exhausted and delirious all at once, a happy adrenaline passing from his limbs. "Makes the whole week worth it," he said breathlessly. They moved slowly to the dock and the boat knocked against it, starboard oars gathered up against the slats. Before he left William felt Eric's hands on his shoulders, and he fell back. "Bow pair," Eric said, palm up to shake. They had that small piece of power, the technical rowers guiding the rest, opposites on water than to how they acted on land; Eric worrying and William the optimist._

_He gripped Eric's hand and raised it above their heads. "Bow and two."_

* * *

Philip surprised him by being in the drawing room, looking nearly as exhausted as he felt.

"Crawley," he said, in the clipped way of adults, of soldiers from the last war, a way that sounded false in his still-young voice. William began to feel unwelcome. Something about his cousin had always put him on edge, some sense of entitlement Philip leeched from sharing blue blood, though he was a Gregson with his mother's looks, her narrow nose, her eyes. A precocious only child, still youthfully vain despite the Army training. Edith gave William a sympathetic look.

"When did you get back?" William asked.

"First of June."

The last day of bad bombing, the weather clearing as it wouldn't again. William swallowed down a thought of Ian Raynesford, alongside him on the board, waiting in full gear for the scramble, another of the squadron gone. There was no time to dwell on it. They'd kept steady formation until a 109 had cut their tail, and as he'd been forced to curve away from fire the last William saw was his friend's Hurricane tumbling through a siphon of cloud, without radio contact.

"Lucky," he managed to say.

Philip eyed him testily. "I'd say so. Considering the help your lot were."

"Sorry?" William said. He squared his shoulders and didn't blink when Philip stepped close, but instead raised his chin in a mark of authority they had learned as children. William saw determination in him that did not suit the face of a fifteen year old boy, even if he looked his age now in soft cotton, bathed and bandaged.

William could feel Philip's fingers bruising his arm, the skin of his cheeks flush. His cousin's face tipped into a bitter smile, the gold of his eyes darkening. "You don't deserve to wear those wings," he said, pushing his hair back in agitation as he stepped away.

"Philip!" Edith cried.

He wheeled on her. "There was no cover! Luftwaffe strafed us, the only chance we had was a god-damned bit of fog."

William scoffed, crossed him arms, felt the exhaustion spark out in favour of indignation. "We couldn't very well shoot them down over the beaches," he said, studying his cousin and keeping his voice at level calm. "There was a reason we fought inland – so whatever Jerry you saw must have escaped the cordon."

Phillip paced up the room and back down it, his hand clenching then shaking out a fist. "They'll spin it as a victory," he muttered. "Bloody papers."

"Says the son of journalists," William drawled.

"Don't get smart, Downton."

Anger surged. _Child_, William thought. "Shall we talk about the circumstances of your enlistment, then?" he spat.

Philip glared at him from over the fireplace. "God, it's too late for this," William said. "I'm sorry, Aunt Edith."

He left the room before Edith could speak, Philip glowering. Edith shut the door silently behind her to find William in the foyer, re-buttoning his greatcoat. "Surely you're not thinking you'll take the motor," she whispered. "I won't let you drive, not when you haven't slept."

Her coddling re-sparked the anger that had only just been tamped down, the fatigue of having been airborne for five days out of nine, landings and protocol and commands shuddering through his brain every time he blinked. The debrief that had dragged on while all he could think of was the mess of the beach, civilian boats guiding out military ones, men in lines that became submerged in the sea. Swim out. Shoot down. Clear props. Keep cordon. And if he could fly a Hurricane...

"I'm able to operate a bloody car!" he snapped. The look on her face made him realize what he'd said, and the memory that was only imagined to him slunk back to curl in his throat. His hands tightened on his cap. "I'm sorry."

She enfolded him in a hug. The delicacy of it reminded him of his mother, so much that he felt an ache of homesickness under the grime and petrol that clung to his uniform. "You'll stay here, and get a train in the morning," Edith said. "Don't worry about Philip."

"He's been in this war six months. He's too young," William said.

"They already have him," Edith said, lifting her hand to his cheek, and he saw for the briefest flicker the pain that was wearing through them all. He wilted a little as he nodded and began trudging up the stairs. "And a bath might be in order, you smell horrid," she called softly after him, smiling when he looked back.

For the first time in days, he laughed.

* * *

_June, 1939_

_The party ended, the revels of too much champagne spilling through everyone's limbs, and William watched people filter through vacated tables until only Eric and Tamsin were tucked in a corner of the room, blond heads bright against the wood panelling. When he took up with Tamsin, a graduate from Lady Margaret Hall, he damned the consequences. But she loved him in that fierce way everyone did, like his optimism was something in need of shelter. Like the fact that he laughed easily was the mark of a child. In some ways, it was. Things slipped from him and he was blameless, brilliant, thinking a step ahead with his hands animated, that lined smile awaiting approval. _

_Hannah tugged on William's arm. They left. Behind a trail of guests they weaved through cool corridors until a set of steps took them to the open edge of Trinity's park, beaten off the library's quadrangle. The air had a warm burnt perfume. While Hannah sat he leaned on his heels, the bench edge pressing the backs of his knees, and looked into the dusk._

_Hannah shifted closer. "Do you think we'll come back?" She settled her shoe off then on her heel, and he watched her pale hand, fingers curving over the dip of insole. He couldn't imagine them building munitions, knuckles blackened, nor cracked and dry from the carbolic soap of nursing. "People are so on edge."_

_Some had seen it for years. Spain was receding as Germany roared to the forefront, wireless news accompanying lengthened days as the sun heated the world with a pure light. Hannah sighed. "I hate to say the word, though politicians throw it about."_

_William grimaced. "War."_

_She looked up at him. "Sit down," she said quietly. He didn't. Her warmth neared again. "Would you go?"_

"_My father did." It wasn't an answer, but it was somehow comforting to know there was a family line in it, something shared. He expected it was a line many young men would follow; footsteps to tread in that were already set, making the transition easier. "I would," he said._

"_Honourable," she murmured, turning her cheek to his ribcage. She nuzzled there, profile to the silk lapel of his dinner jacket. Her hair was loose of its clip, clinging to the edge of her mouth, pin curls into waves at her jaw. She swiped clumsily at it. "Why are you, William?" she asked, breath warm on his shirt, sweet with alcohol. Her arm fell about his back, fingers pressed to his hip. And he was confronted with it: You're too lovely not to help, he thought. Even now, you are set alight. _

_She straightened to standing, but her weight was not her own, balanced on his. She kissed him with no restraint, his calmer response causing a high sound to rise in her throat. There was something acrid in the taste of her lipstick, her hands drawing across his collar and down his chest to wind around him beneath his jacket, and the only control in her seemed to be in the shift of her fingers along the depression of his spine. She clasped his hand, putting it to the line of her waist, and it would be so easy to let his palm fall along her side, the dip of her back extended by her curve against him. It had happened before. No. _

_William pulled away at the sound of footsteps, Hannah wilting. He looked past her into the unlit corridor across the square. Its shadow extended as Eric came into view, his tie gone and his suit rumpled by his hands in his pockets. He stopped at the edge of the grass and raised his eyebrows. "I am drunk," he said. "But not so drunk to be seeing things."_

_His eyes met William's and there was a sweep of regret, guilt at the tone of his voice, its thin line between sarcasm and annoyance. William gently pushed at Hannah's shoulder and she turned, limbs loose against him. She folded into herself when she saw her brother._

"_Eric," she said, pressing a hand to her cheek and sweeping her hair from her face in one motion. "Oh God."_

"_You shouldn't assume I'm angry." Eric looked between them. "I'm not." His good nature always won out, giving him a higher ground, a moral intelligence."I could have predicted it, really," he said. He smoothed at the back of his hair. "Anyhow, I was coming to find you because Tamsin's leaving soon."_

_Hannah had her hand across her face, cheeks flush above her fingers. William looked over at her, felt her discomfort in the air. "We'll be there in a minute," he said quietly. He kept his eyes on her as Eric retreated, the white skin around her red mouth where pressure had pushed the blood away, the straightened arc of her eyebrows with the angle of her head, the blue of her gown gathering black against the ground. He reached blindly for where her hand hung between them. "I wish he would be angry," she said suddenly. "He was so protective when we were children."_

_William dared a laugh. It was something he could not understand, to have a sibling. "What, you thought he'd hit me?"_

_She wasn't listening, eyes set on a middle distance. "He's a year older, but..." She smiled in a sad, wistful way. "He used to be frightened of August thunderstorms," she said softly. "It was the only time I could be the better one. Be stronger. And what's happened now is proof that neither of us fight at all."_

_Beneath her embarrassment he realised she was afraid. She had talked of war and her worry reached to her brother first, how she feared it would change him. How the prospect already had. William imagined the way Eric would leave Oxford in a few weeks, driving from the city shouting something behind him, all fair hair and slatted eyes and cheshire grin gone down Parks Road. _

_To him, these days felt constant, unbroken. Full of static air._

* * *

_June 5, 1940_

"I'd never have put you down as a flyboy."

It was a voice William couldn't forget, high over the sounds and echoes of King's Cross. He turned from the board marking his passage to York and found Hannah, red-brown hair tucked under a green beret that marked her as MTC. "Blue suits you," she said as he walked towards her. She looked on him with shining eyes, a slight deference from beneath her eyelashes, gloves twisted in her hands.

"Ambulances?" he asked, taking in the circled cross on her lapels.

She nodded. "Would you believe Eric's a motorcycle courier for the Army in Eritrea, of all places?" she asked, eyes scanning the boards. "He's flung himself as far as he can."

The tightness in her voice made William pause but ask no question of it. As he looked at her he wondered if this was what adults felt like, seeing the mannerisms they'd loved in a person repeat in unlikely circumstances and become changed by them. In watching her cross her arms and prop one elbow up, hand stray at her shoulder with fingers poised, he saw what Hannah had been. Curled in his rooms with sheets tangling her legs, a cigarette from that same hand; hazel eyes up close, a freckle on the point where collarbone met shoulder, the taste on her lips. How could a mannerism that looked shy and elegant then be so uncomfortable now under grey, glassed-in sky?

He watched her wrist flex, tendons and veins under translucent skin, and he thought of Eric's anatomy books, the cluster of bones that formed rotation beneath a web of ligaments. _Scaphoid, lunate, capitate. _Eric had recited them, eight taps on his fingertips until the words had become a part of the metre of his breath and his vocabulary. So fierce in his want of precision. But Hannah's gaze was fiercer, directed now at platform numbers.

William smiled. "God, Africa?"

"He's a fool," she said dismissively. She schooled her face and looked at him with a brighter expression. "Where are you off to?"

"Home," he sighed.

She raised her eyebrows. "And here I am with a dreary flat in Clapham," she said, though it wasn't with any contempt. He laughed, a feeling of fondness coming back to him after what seemed like a long dormancy.

They called his train; Hannah stepped close to him, looped her arms around his neck, and he felt relief that her smell hadn't changed, his cheek tucked to her hair as her hand lay flat between his shoulders. Her nose nudged his temple as she spoke. "It's wonderful you can still smile, William Crawley."

**tbc.**


	2. Downton

**ii**

_The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us._

* * *

_June 5, 1940_

Downton never changed, William thought, seeing its spires rise from the land as the car pulled into the grounds. It never changed, but he saw it differently and had done since he was sixteen and finished upper sixth form, holding his grandfather's hand in a stifling room. William had watched the breath fracture from Robert's chest, and he went to Oxford with a title. As 'Lord Grantham' glanced against the honeyed stone of Trinity it did not feel right, it felt profane, he felt too small for such a weight. At Oxford he was the singular being upholding it; only at home was it cradled by generations.

Now he had dual titles: Earl and Flying Officer, and here the two worlds felt at their closest to colliding. He thanked Chapman and gathered his kit bag himself. It was not like returning from school. There was a hollow of nerves in his chest when nodding to Barrow at the door, shedding his coat and gloves to the butler and striding into an empty great hall. He turned to the library, knowing the worry he would find in that room. His bones ached for sleep.

* * *

Mary's hands flitted over William's arms, brushing the sleeves of his uniform. He let her hug him, hold his weight up, his body collapsing back on the settee the minute she let him go.

"A week of futile dogfights," he said, scrubbing over his face. She noticed the purple smudged along his eyes, the pale gauntness of his cheeks, hair tangling under his fingers. "After debriefing I got into London on the last train. Gave Aunt Edith quite a fright." He laughed out a single bark. His eyes shut. He reached up to loosen his tie. "I'm absolutely shattered."

"Go up and rest, darling," Mary said.

He moved wearily to the door but paused at its threshold, hand finding the jamb. He looked to be alright, but watching his back she had the sudden fear that he wasn't. She put it down to exhaustion. Battle fatigue, wasn't that what they called it now? He seemed more than simply tired, a tense line stringing up his spine, through his hands and expressions like he was a marionette doll. Strain had taken grace from him.

She couldn't imagine just what he was doing, nor would he ever properly say. _Waiting_, was what his letters told her. _Hurricanes are a bit of a racket._ Banal things, details between that he couldn't speak about. He was so stoic it scared her, slowly pivoting, a slack look to his face and eyes raised to hers.

"Thank you, Mama," he said. "For being so calm." His throat worked, mouth shifting as he rolled a thought against his tongue, then breathed in. "It helps," was all he said.

"Of course." She smiled. "Go on."

Maybe it was relief, or a different sort of worry, but as he left the room she sank back to sitting, then the crying came.

* * *

At the top of the stairs William waved off assistance, entering his room silently. Shutting the door he leaned against it, then crossed to unlock a window. He stood with palm against the latch for a moment, looking out to the park. Nothing had shifted here, the tranquility unbroken, and the crisp summer day set a hostile restlessness in his limbs. He needed the break, but he hated its idleness.

He turned and undid the buckle on his tunic belt, twisting and throwing the whole lot on top of the trunk his kit bag lay against. It was a frustrated gesture, and the buttons skittered on wood.

The trunk in his mother's room was identical. He rethought his carelessness, picking up the tunic and folding it. He could count on one hand the number of times his mother had opened that trunk, the once he had himself when she was not angry but hesitant in the face of his questioning.

Before he had made the association with his father, he had imagined the green greatcoat as his own, worn in a six foot trench as a cape behind him. A boyish imagining of clean heroic war. His own rarely-worn greatcoat, blue, was a shade of sky and darker than his eyes, silver buttons not gold. And it was a different world for his war to fracture, cracks healed from the first turning to fissures. He thought that because of it his mother saw more of his father in him now than she ever had, and he did not know what to emulate.

He flipped his braces off his shoulders, undoing his tie and bunching the fabric in his hand. His other hand lifted to his brow where a headache beginning in the tension there. He sat on the edge of the bed and pressed the pads of his fingers to the sting creasing his eyes, to the edged hollow of bone, and thought of the stretched skin of Hannah's cheeks at the station, the sudden push of skeleton that tiredness could afford. She was so very different, brightness gone. And Eric: the leap of surprise hearing he was in Africa, wondering whether his vibrancy that once was near wild had been tamped out by the desert.

They were doing what was needed. What was owed. Their time at Oxford no longer seemed real, and Hannah's question in those last weeks of June, _will we come back?_ became shadowed.

William didn't know. He crawled into his bed with the smell of plane petrol and soot lodged in the lines of his palms, and slept.

* * *

He woke to the warm light of late afternoon, a yellow glow beneath the curtains. He watched them sway in a thin wind, the diaphanous edge of lighter cloth wavering beneath the drapery. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms either side of him. The luxury and comfort of this bed had been forgotten, traded for a cot tucked in dingy rooms on the fringe of the airbase. He pressed his head back into the pillow to feel it decompress with the weight of his skull, then raised his palms over his face and sat up.

He had dreamt of Raynesford. His subconscious had not yet learned the tactics of moving on quickly, a standard amongst his colleagues as names were wiped from the board and not mentioned again. William knew that Ralph Anderson had the worst job out of it, as acting Commanding Officer, writing the letters to family. Within the squadron their sector of seven pilots was now six. One less plane. William's identifier was not 'black three' now, but two. These little shifts were a gap quietly closing, as they were left with memory of a person gone.

* * *

"What did I miss?"

William had slept through luncheon, through most of the day, and descended in early evening wearing trousers and a white shirt that had become looser on him than Mary remembered. She smiled at him as he crossed the drawing room and sat beside her. "Are you hungry?" she asked, reaching out to smooth his hair. He allowed her touch, as she wasn't sure he would, and nodded.

They talked as he ate from a tray, side by side on the sofa, and Mary was suddenly glad of this time, this quiet just the two of them, as she watched him press crumbs through the prongs of his fork then set the cutlery down. "I got your telegram," he said. "About Sybbie. It's wonderful – I've always liked Leon."

Mary had met Leon Howard only once, briefly in the summer before the war started, and remembered brown eyes, hints of a Dorset accent; a man who was quiet, but watchful, Sybbie never letting go of his hand.

"They're so very young to marry," Mary said.

"I don't blame them." She watched William's face grow grim, eyes fading to dull grey beneath heavy eyelids, and as the dinner tray was taken away he leaned back into the shell of the sofa, tucking himself into the corner between back and arm. "It's a bit of security, isn't it?" he sighed. "And now France is as good as gone... sorry. You don't want to know."

She did, but there would be proper announcements soon, though she found that now he was back what the papers said did not matter as much to her as it had. "Was it terrible?" she whispered.

She knew he would be cryptic, but this was sudden panic, her concern unleashing something in him that made his eyes clap shut and his fists curl. "It's always... but this was a mess, Mama. Half the days we couldn't fly, thank God, because when we could... and Raynesford..." He let out a hoarse sound and covered his face. He crawled across to her, head finding the crook of her neck like he hadn't since he was a child.

"Raynesford?"

"Philip had the nerve to be angry at me, but he's wrong; I didn't sit idle, I did so much, _so much_, Mama."

"Darling," she whispered, tucking her mouth against his hair, her arms wrapping around his shoulders. They compressed beneath her hands, and she could tell he was holding his breath, his body beginning to tremble. "William," she said. It was like a key, turned just the right way, and he breathed again, great stuttering breaths, her blouse damp under his cheek. He couldn't speak. It was unlike anything she had seen from him, sadness above exhaustion and dread at going back. Grief, untouched before in him – even after his grandfather's death when it was a still, numb silence – shattered now and rocked him in her arms. Grief for his namesakes and for those he'd known and lost as well; for her living it all again, fresh and more mechanized; for whatever was bright in him growing tarnished. He shifted and murmured something against her. She did not hear and pulled him up.

His eyelashes hung damp over pale cheeks, a faint flush arcing on them, and there was much of herself in his delicate features battling emotion. He looked up, his eyes made bluer by their sheen of tears. "I asked what my father would think of me," he said unsteadily. "I have a picture but..." He shook his head, flinching away.

Then she understood exactly what his grief was – his fear and anxiety of disappointment from a man he'd never known. _So_ _young_, she thought. And she reached to his hair again, turning pieces gently through her fingers, dark and unruly.

"Do you remember what I kept?" she asked.

He swallowed. "Greatcoat, mess jacket, photographs, watch," he listed.

"Something else." She paused. "That took much longer."

He met her gaze with a small frown, eyes narrowed and clear, that part of him that was completely Matthew's. Then he stood, was out the front door before Barrow could stop him, and Mary watched him round the building at a run, sunlight slipping from him. He passed from orange light to purple, through the bleeding lines of shadow in-between, then far down the drive he became a white spot at the edge of the wall near the garage.

* * *

The wind his speed created dried his face, and Chapman's surprised snap of his newspaper at the sight of William in the doorway pushed air back into his lungs. "I want to see it," William said, nodding to a large dustsheet, the peek of a chrome grill beneath it. The tarp drew back with a swing of the chauffeur's arm, the vehicle revealing itself, headlights looking him straight on with a bright gleam. William put his hands in his pockets and stepped forward.

"It's a beautiful car, milord."

"She is," William conceded. He had become used to looking at mechanics, the workings of a plane, but this was a smaller beast, one of the land, one of dark connotations. His mother had kept it for him. And he knew why now, seeing it at the only time and age he could understand its weight, its beauty, its easy switch from function to fatality. He knew the air; the silent dive to earth. Death was insular, and his father was only another story, the final story, all the stories of him in objects. His mother had kept the car. His uncle Tom had fixed it.

His weariness had not worn off with sleep, and he wondered if it would ever go. A surge of curiosity pushed through as he stared at the car's gleaming badge and thin wheels, and decided he must take this chance to know just how it had been.

"Do you have the keys, Chapman?" he asked.

"No, sir. Your mother was insistent we... destroy them."

It was here, in perfect condition, but it was not drivable. Of course. Beneath a quiet ache lay a slight annoyance, for he wanted the tangibility, the sense of closeness that sitting behind the wheel would afford, knowing... he sighed. "If you could leave me, please."

Chapman nodded, keeping the garage doors wide to the evening, and William walked up the alley between the family Bentley and the AC, running his fingers over the sage paint of the bonnet until they pressed to the windscreen. The door opened with a neat snap, and he stepped up into the bed of the car, wheels creaking with a weight they hadn't felt for nearly twenty years. He sat on cool leather, steering wheel smooth beneath his palms, fingers stuttering over the indents on its underside; his feet found the pedals, his thumb the accelerator at the centre of the wheel.

He could not imagine his father here, could never really imagine him outside of the two fixed images he had. The moving, breathing person he always imagined wearing the greatcoat, or the cardinal red jacket he'd loved as a child, was never facing him and never speaking. William thought of Tom instead, because he could remember him lying beneath this car, its grease on his hands, sat next to Sybbie on the sideboard by the sink as his uncle worked and told them of when he was chauffeur. That Irish lilt stuck, and there were many stories William knew, many people's histories in his head tangled with his own.

He had never learned to drive. How odd, what a jarring necessity, to know the complexities of flight but not a motorcar. What he knew was all angles and tangents and speeds of ascent; altimeter and radar, that first solo sortie above a patchwork of land and high cloud. The plane had become an extension of him, agile in the clarity that existed above the cloud line, and though three quarters of an hour passed in the test flight it had felt like no time at all.

Sun edged its way over the ground, the front of the car, lighting gold in its paint and he saw another layer to why his mother never looked at it. Evening swarmed dark in the corners, and as the first fox cried he got out, closing the door as quietly as he could. He dragged the tarpaulin back over the headlights.

Outside, Chapman was nowhere to be found, but there was a stale smell of cigarettes beneath the sweet fug of summer's dry grasses. Lights warmed the lower floor of the house, an arc of yellow across the ground with the park's cedars dusky beyond it.

He had a few days before his return to the airbase. He thought of the upcoming wedding, not sombre, but reflective, knowing he'd be likely to miss it. The idea of absent time was no longer irritating but precious and purred in him, like start-up propellors, like the rattle and glow of instruments. He shut his eyes to men silent in their lines over white ground; the black hulk of ships and lorries set high past the tide mark; French songs below the fog. The changing smell of London, sandbags. Sybbie and Leon. They were all flung from this place and brought back to it as different shades of themselves.

He rolled his neck and opened his eyes to the last band of bloody sky; stretched, crouched, and ran the long way back to the house.

**tbc.**


	3. The Few

_A/N: Thank you all for your lovely reviews and to oiseaus for her kindly recommending this story on tumblr. Here we go, onwards in history..._

* * *

**iii**

_Superiority, in the air upon which in a large measure the decision of the war depends._

* * *

_July, 1940_

It was not even dawn, the grey haze barely lifted, but this morning first light warranted a Luftwaffe attack, and William dressed as ground crew moved outside. He sat on his cot to tuck his boots, taking his flying jacket off its hook by the door. The corridor was cold, reams of breath in front of him.

Scott McQuillen was waiting with a cigarette already on his lips and cup in hand. His lifebelt hung limp over his tunic, hair nearly matching its beige. With his head tilted back to look at William his eyebrows were washed out by the harsh overhead lighting, making him look childish.

"You've not snuck booze in there, have you?" William asked, swinging his jacket over his shoulders as he eyed the cup of anemic tea.

Scott gave a huff of laughter. "Not taken a Spit on an op before," he said in his South African drawl.

"No," William returned. It was a kick up from his Hurricane, but the lauded Spitfires were limited, and while he'd taken one out in practice runs he didn't know if he would be given the privilege of its control in the frenzied tactics of battle. Scott was a better pilot, mathematical with his targets. As CO, Ralph Anderson would get one; he had the grace and foresight to ensure her one thousand horsepower didn't go amiss and made it back to ground. The weavers and wingmen would take out older planes.

After a moment's silence Scott winked and walked ahead. "Come on," he said. "Scramble won't wait for stragglers."

They ducked out of the quarters and crossed the base with mist burning from the trees. The clatter and talk of ground crew reached them as they rounded the station hut and the airfield opened up, its grass soon to be humming with propeller din. William felt the nerves wracking up in his stomach, empty. He smiled when Ralph's dark eyes met his across the room. Men lounged with papers and magazines. One whistled aimlessly. There was a still edge of tension below the look of their simple leisure; Ralph passed a cricket ball between his hands, the snap of it on his palms like a clock ticking, and Aldridge's foot tapped by the side of his deckchair. Barton was restless in scanning a copy of _The Times_. Kinlan's eyes were closed.

This was the strain of waiting, unease, a telephone about to split their vigil.

* * *

Water careened back into the lighter lines of sky as William pulled up from another dive, tracery smoke painting the trajectory of damaged aircraft. He couldn't be sure who had gone. Navy ships huddled at the edges of the Channel, Stukas swooping onto them, and it was only an agile roll that had got him out from under German fire, turning at a climb to double back on its larger wings. He'd seen a Spit arc through the clouds, coughing smoke that was ominously black.

Above the shudder of his plane was the patter of shooting, the drone of 88s and a quicker snap in 109s. His own breathing held his ears, punctuated by swearing he was barely aware of. They wouldn't last more than fifteen minutes. Brief respites were in cloud banks or finding an altitude above it all. There was a grim sort of pride in defending his own soil, until the fight would end as suddenly as it came, Ralph angling them to the coast, and they would descend for home, weary with gaps in their formations.

Who knew when another assault would appear? They went up at dusk, in a sunset only summer could give, their roundels muted by the pastel light. They were above a country going into blackout. The wounded flashed blinding instead of falling shadowed, in the sun's transition.

Tomorrow, again.

* * *

_August, 1940_

There was fog. Low-level flyers were sneaking higher up the coast. Airfields were targets, giving their station added worry. "Dorniers are bloody murder," Ralph muttered upon hearing reports. He paced between ops. It was relentless, and William lost count of the number of times they were scrambled, plane nearly taxed beyond its ability. Plumbers refitted ammunition belts, with fuel stops and prop checks done under hangar doors that were never shut. It all rushed past.

He had ceased worrying about dying, even a month in. Each day seemed luckier than the last for those who scraped through. He was never cavalier, but he got to know his plane as another limb and another part of his mind. It was automatic. To be able to come up breathing from a barrel roll, a tailspin – the blunt realisation that he was comfortable 20,000 feet in the air – meant success.

"_Black two, turning to seven. Over_," Ralph's voice came over the radio.

The black hulk of a German raid was just there, over the cloud line, through it, accompanied by a drone too loud to ignore reverberating on every inch of air and hitting the cockpit harshly. "Watch your tail, Black one" William radioed back. Scott's plane was staggered directly behind him, and they climbed; another layer of 88s came through cloud. "Shit," William hissed.

"_Climbing to twelve. Stay on my wing, Crawley._"

"Damn well trust me, Anderson," William muttered to himself. They were in amongst the swarm, thick in a deafening hum. He aimed close to a Junker's wing, hitting the port propellor. It fell away as he angled sharply up, banking a starboard turn. Individual dogfights broke out. The din thinned. His heart pumped and he was in a state of such concentration he was barely aware of himself. Like a fugue. An automatic, essential hyper-alertness.

* * *

_September, 1940_

"RT failed," Ralph spat bitterly, storming in under a thin rain, his jacket spotted with it. "Again. We need to be re-fitted, this is bloody ridiculous." He sat, dumped his kit, stood and walked towards the board, clenched his fingers around its cleaning cloth. "Christ," he hissed, raising his hand to the division between Black sector and Red. He swiped Scott's name from their own section. William watched the letters smudge out, the rank.

Ralph's shoulders stooped, dark hair curling at odd angles from damp. "Collided with another Spit," he said.

William's eyes focussed on the way he appeared to be rocking, the sway of his body from side to side like he was trying to keep himself from leaving the room. Ralph's long silence made William see his struggle at twenty-five, nearly an ace, all those black crosses painted onto his plane's nose, all that weight within the squadron. Then Ralph slammed his hand against the board, palm flat.

"How are we meant to do anything if we can't communicate between ourselves?" He shook his head. "McQuillen could have come back." His gaze was trained to the floor, and he sat slowly, his body seeming to calm, leaned forward with elbows on knees. He spoke from between his fingers. There was a tired shock in his eyes, their ochre dulled. "Useless," he said. "I feel ruddy useless."

William watched him carefully. Morale had fallen as exhaustion rose. Men too tired to pay attention got shot down; wings snapped off, a standard pull to the fall, and sometimes the only way to tell if he knew them was by the flash on their tail, the rest of the fuselage on fire or too mangled to recognise. William understood Ralph's floundering. It seemed the attack would never relent, and day by day his own resolve was waning. One had to end before the other.

* * *

_December 30, 1940_

What ended was invasion. The Germans were wilting back, their tide in daylight ebbing and receding out to France. A week before Christmas.

Despite it, he had not left the airbase. There was the draw and strike of a match behind him. "William," Ralph said, folding his hands on the railing. They stood on the balcony of the control tower, the busy mill inside muffled by plate glass. A breeze ran past them. There was the heavy weight of rain in the clouds, those more northern black enough for snow. In this environment Ralph's voice seemed to have a grave formality, and William stood taller.

"Sir," he said.

Ralph laughed. "No need for that." He leaned over the bannister, feet poised, then looked at William straight on. "You're due some leave," he said gently. "I mean properly." When William began to speak Ralph held up his hand. "Don't argue. 11 Group owes you a fair lot. God knows why we kept that brilliance off the Spits for so long."

Now there were steady night raids, and perhaps for a while things could be passed to Bomber Command. "Thank you," William said.

Ralph nodded. "See your family." A pause. "See London." He flexed his hands, squinting out onto the flat Sussex landscape with a grimace, and William knew the subtext of that sentence. _Before Jerry decimates it. _But Ralph turned back and smiled, brushing the sombreness away, and William saw what he had trained himself to be, polished and demanding and controlled. The facade of being unaffected. He wondered when Ralph's last leave had been. Ralph's body held exhaustion; William knew he wouldn't relent, caught up in a drive and a responsibility to keep order of his own men. It was his way to cope, to keep going, amidst a tally of losses.

The two shook hands. Walking away William felt a sudden, panicked worry for Hannah.

* * *

_January 1, 1941_

At the south side of Lambeth Bridge Hannah tangled her arms around him. Her breath gave a single flutter, calmed, then her hands were either side of his face. William smiled between them, and she uttered an odd laugh, hugging him again. He didn't know whether it was relief for his well-being, or simply recognising a face in the foreign ruins London now held, but his heart sped at the desperate happiness of her greeting.

"Eric's here," she said, composing herself. She spoke quickly. "In England. Fairford. Mum fussing over him."

It had been nearly two years since he'd seen Eric. All that time in North Africa. William couldn't imagine how his friend had changed, but knew the optimistic Oxford memory couldn't have entirely upheld. It would be like projecting another person on the one he was faced with, an image which didn't correlate, and he was afraid to know what of that picture was still in sync and what moved independently, a phantom limb.

The wind made Hannah's hair a mess. He reached out to tuck a strand behind her ear. Imperceptibly she tilted into the touch; it was the tiniest notification that they still had a familiarity, still felt something shared. He let his fingers linger just above her ear. "Have you seen him?" he asked, hand dropping.

"He said he'd come down." Her eyes were glittering. "And I'm glad." She placed her hands on his shoulders, running over the lapels of his greatcoat then stilling at the edge of his arms.

When she met his eyes he raised his eyebrows as a question, and it became a game of silence, her stepping close and him back, playful, an almost dance until he took the cap from his head in a gesture of surrender, her mouth pressing to his. And with the warmth, hat crushed under his palm on her back, feeling moved back through his nerves, an emotion different and lighter than the past months had held. Hope.

* * *

_January 2, 1941_

Eric carried the desert with him, uniform beige, a purer tone than the Embankment's grey. His eyes had been trained into a permanent squint. He was sandy, hair streaked brighter blond. Hannah had said he looked well, and he did, still glad of his luck in getting Christmas leave, a familiar looseness in his stature. But he looked worn too. Shadow ate into the strong planes of his face, skin tanned, lace-up boots scuffed with residual dust. He rolled his sleeves above his elbows like a mechanic. His bag was slung across his back, tin helmet tied to it dented and scratched.

Maybe it was the desolation of London, but he was slower to speak than he had been. "Don't let it take you over, Will," he said. He smoked harshly, the purse of his lips pulling on the line of his profile. "'Total war'." He shook his head, voice low and bitter. "I'd like to think about my future."

"It's a dangerous thing to think about," William said.

It felt like a recited line, trite, and Eric had flint in his face, hard angles to his cheek and jaw but a softening around his eyes, their brown black. He propped the hand holding his cigarette across his other arm. "Less dangerous than being a reckless fool," he said with raised eyebrows. "Isn't all this meant to make us wise?" His stare was serious for a moment, then settled, the old smile restoring its lines over the bright flash of teeth. "And anyway, something's got to keep that RAF ego in check."

They'd walked a fair distance downriver, to a small roadside green past the walls of the hospital. William looked to the ruddy-bricked cluster of Lambeth Palace, road curving against it. Eric turned away from the river too, up into the street, cars gone now curfew was fast approaching. "Blackout soon," William said. They climbed the grassed slope to the road, turning back to the rubble edging St. Thomas' south wing. Eric ran his hand against the high wall once they'd skirted around the damage, their pace quick.

"What I'd give to intern here," he said. The windows curved above them, white-edged. His voice had a longing that was deep-set, years old, and William saw a different sort of expectation in his friend to that he himself had grown up with: not to carry on as generations had but to get out, to make a mark on the world. Eric had that drive, determination and optimism that it would all turn out in his favour if he worked hard enough. But William could also see reality knocking against him, and wondered if its buffet would have caught Eric eventually, without war to make it a stronger blow than it could have been. He wondered if Eric would have interned and gained the title of doctor, and perhaps there would have been a patient who chipped away some part of his resolve, his goodness.

And now, for it to happen after war's end it would be digging deeper then, at damage William feared would be irreparable. Eric had fault in him, now. He felt blame, and it was there in the tremor of his hands around a cigarette; a self-questioning.

"Why didn't you work in a field hospital?" William asked.

"Didn't have the practical experience." Eric shrugged. "I suppose I was frightened that battlefield surgery would put me off medicine entirely."

They'd entered St Thomas' drive, a porter walking the interior of the wall and checking the gates, and as they passed him they didn't speak any more. William knew he was lucky, in a way; to not see the blood that a ground soldier would. Instead he saw planes and smoke falling away, a sort of remoteness in it that was worse for its imaginings. Men went into the Channel and crashed either side of it, died, were captured, and while he knew the facts, he was thousands of feet in the air, escaping that fate for another day. Perhaps there was less certainty in relying on aircraft rather than your own power; the craft was you, and in flight he felt the diving and turning as the plane did it. He was the sight behind eight machine guns. He made it live.

But as a soldier might be his uniform, to the outside those in a squadron were only the markings on their wings and flanks and white underbellies.

He slung his arm around Eric's shoulders.

* * *

Eric went back before he did. The three of them together again was like a strange imitation of university, two days of it, hollow. The only old and genuine thing was that Eric laughed at them as he said his goodbye. William realised as he walked into the station's crowd, blond head distinctly tall above the rest, that he'd laughed because of how close Hannah stood, hand weaved in William's. He'd laughed hopefully, happily, that something could stay the same.

Bombing stretched until May. The country shook with it. There was talk of night fighters, up amongst the Blenheims and Lancasters, though it was never their own squadron leaving at dusk. For a time, Black sector fell quiet.

Then summer rose hot with incendiaries. Again the skies grew to be relentless.

* * *

_August, 1941_

After six months, he had no words for the state he returned to in London. The bright filter of sunlight did nothing to lessen the impact of what bombs had done to the city. If anything there was more clarity in the harsh shadows rubble made, the smell of burning high on hot, still air. From Victoria he made a direct route into Westminster, buildings along Christchurch Gardens gone, the Abbey's east wing crumbled. A worker rounding the precinct tipped his hat, both in solidarity and to the uniform. "Getting Berlin though, eh?" he said. William smiled fleetingly at him and turned right towards the river.

Walking on had a strange sensation that he was doing nothing but doubling back the way he'd come. Distinct buildings looked the same hacked down to mortar and fallen into road craters, pipes jutting from the dirt like bisected tree roots. Behind its gates Parliament bore a scar, scaffolding on its tower, and looking down Whitehall there was a fine film of smoke, eastwards black with it. Lambeth stood on ragged ends. And St. Thomas' stood against the Embankment, facade worn, a part of its innards gutted.

Seeing Hannah was a relief, a cool feeling in him. Her tunic was draped in the open window of the ambulance, her back to him, and though he tried to sneak up on her she saw him peripherally first. She kissed him in the ambulance bay, a quick kiss as a huddle of nurses smoked, giggled, their navy capes turned up to reveal red linings. Hannah led him between vehicles, past into a dingy office space that was strong with petrol. She stopped when she saw him smiling at her. "What?"

"Nothing, just... that wasn't like you."

She glanced back out into the courtyard. "Those girls can't see a uniform without thinking there's something to fix," she said, running her fingers over the zipper of his jacket. "You got through the city alright?"

He let out a long breath, and she gave an understanding smile, hand over his elbow as she moved past him to a brighter room, an empty office with desk and chair and little else.

"What's this?" he asked, picking an envelope out from the tunic he'd carried in for her, flipping it over then back. He pulled the chair out and sat.

"I haven't read it," she said. "It's from Mum and Dad, I've just not had time to open it." She gestured for him to slit the envelope. She smiled over her shoulder from her place at the window. "I'd much rather you read it to me."

Inside was a thin page, a smaller paper packaged within that, folded into quarters. Notepaper, written in quick scrawl that was smudged at the edges, a fountain pen running. William scanned it. "Hannah, it's not a letter," he said quietly, not taking his his eyes off the page. "Well, not from them – they've enclosed a letter from Eric's regiment."

She turned sharply. "Why?"

He gave her a long look, not knowing what to say. Her shoulders straightened, hands clasping elbows. "Read it," she said, and the reed of vulnerability in her voice brought out a higher, more polished note than he'd heard before. He sighed and sat forward in the chair, feeling locked in it, pages dangling limply between his hands. "I don't think I'm the best – "

"If it's bad news I want you to read it. Just tell me!" She was shivering, despite the heat of the day. He stood, shrugging off his jacket and putting the sheepskin over her shoulders. She took a moment to accept it, her eyes still hard. He sat back down when she began playing with the wool at the sleeves.

"'Dear Mr. and Mrs. Brayburn, We... we regret to inform you' – " He paused, read ahead, feeling Hannah's gaze on the top of his head. " – 'that your son, Corporal Eric Brayburn, was killed by enemy fire while stationed in Massawa, Eritrea, on the eighth of April, 1941.'"

"April?" she whispered. The letter was dated later that month, her mother's mid July.

There was more, standard condolences, but William could not stop the tremor in his voice, breathy, lungs like they were both too full and not absorbing enough oxygen. He stopped reading aloud and Hannah took the letter from his hands, her back rigid.

"I can imagine it," she said. "With the ambulance work, I know – "

He guided her to where he sat, and she leaned on the desk, then him. "Stop," he said quietly. Her arms held his head tightly against her, and he could feel the jump of her diaphragm as she struggled not to cry. He ran his hand down her back, over and over, the leather of his own jacket smoothing under his palm.

Somewhere in the office a telephone rang. She stepped away, tucked her hair behind her ears. He watched her fold the letter back onto its creases and wipe her eyes. Precise.

"I won't sleep." She tilted her head into an angle of sun, a tremor wavering in her cheek. "Not that I did anyway with the raids."

"I have to go back to the airbase," he said dully. "I only got 24 hours, I – " He stood and held her, hand curved against the back of her skull, her hands unsure in surprise over his shirt. He shut his eyes. He wanted to apologize but it seemed better not to speak.

He had used to love August, but now summers just meant better sight lines. The country could crumble and William could think that they had done the same: bombs to German ports, incendiary cities, night raids, guilt. Yet the cropped silhouette of squared wings caused an automatic reaction in him, gunning through crosshairs until it wasn't white cloud in front of him but black smoke; screaming, then eyes back to every bearing he could find for another bandit; interrupted by the high thunk of bullets hitting body, and that was when he would swear more than he ever had in his life, his injury making camaraderie flee and isolation flood. When water sat below him and he had to get back to where it thinned to silt then rose to chalk. That's what the selfish did. The Channel was an elite graveyard that he wasn't good enough for.

"Don't worry," Hannah said, fingers to his cheek, and he tried to clear his features. Despite comforting her, he suddenly did not want her to touch him at all.

**tbc.**


	4. Malta

_A/N: Many thanks to oiseaus, swarleyy, and dubiousculturalartifact for their encouragement on this one._

* * *

**iv**

_A new mould of men has been cast._

* * *

_September 1941_

"Some birthday present."

Ralph crouched in front of the dispersal hut's stove, lighting a scrunched piece of newspaper and watching mesmerised as it curled and burned. The smell of soot filtered into the air. He shuffled forward, leaned into the heat of the stove's open door and blew gently on the flame. It cracked on kindling, orange turning his uniform to a dull grey as he stood and took up another match for his cigarette. "I couldn't point Malta out on a map until this morning," he said, shaking out the light.

"Such a tiny scrap of land to be so strategic," Aldridge murmured, burrowing further into his flying jacket.

William could see his breath, and leaned closer to the warmth. "Happy twentieth."

Ralph joined their huddle of chairs around the stove. "My twentieth was in a pub in Maidstone," he said. Laughed. "1935, god."

Something closed in Ralph's demeanour did not easily allow for imaginings of his youth; his face may be boyish but his eyes could be black, every look careful. Far away. Focussed on the fire. His cigarette hung from his lips and his hands locked under his jaw, a sort of mock prayer.

Fourteen. William had been fourteen in 1935, in the maddening heat of that particular summer, so hot that Downton's stone itself radiated and burned. Sybbie tiptoed the line to adulthood; they became separated by their genders. He'd batted in the spring's cricket, and remembered his mother's face at the side of the pitch: her pride edged with memory, making him pause, worry, as so often that look felt like a burden he had caused.

Autumn rain lashed the hut windows in their silence. Fog had rolled in from the coast, a thick bank of it pushing through the tree line. Ralph stood to tend the low coals again. "At least there's sun in Malta," he muttered.

* * *

They took off from an aircraft carrier. In the Mediterranean, from the vast hall of a hangar to a deck that seemed too short, Hurricanes were pulled up, taxied out. The flight deck dipped at its stern, and atop his wing William could view the sea churching out a white froth over the ship's propellors. His own plane prop was reluctant in high wind. Fifth out, he watched others depart, bank sharply to the left once clear of the boat, and the plane become a slight, glimmering creature as it ascended. There was a snap of cloth, voices, before he shut the hood on his cockpit. His inventory began. Throttle. Brakes off. Ground crew cleared. A slow roll forward turned into patching juddering beneath his wheels, quicker, then the platform was gone and he lifted into smooth air and sea below. Apprehension left him. The islands spread as a gold chain in blue water. Cobalt. It had a beauty, that colour, a clean cut, but upon landing he knew it would look a different place.

* * *

On the ground, the first William saw of Luqa was sandbags, three high walls of them with a Beaufighter in their recess like a boat in dry dock. "Safest spot, till we can get her coastal," ground crew said. "We took a bad hit some months ago."

The Hurricanes matched the desert, brown and green, a neat line of wheels on the dust. Beyond them lay a series of huts and tents, the only irregularity on flat ground, setting up their own type of geography. Eastwards was the town itself, and beyond a ramshackle wall the twin spires of Luqa's church rose in amongst the flat-roofed checker of other buildings.

Another Beaufighter was taxiing around a curve in the roadway; slow progress with the engine ambling, shadow splayed to the burnt grass below it. Two men walked backwards in front of its wings to direct the pilot's passage. It wheezed up an incline, propellors near idle. They were forced several feet back, halfway into a gully of prickling grass. As it passed them its black matte body took on a strange sheen, and William realised the sun was dimmed beneath cloud. He took off his cap and looked up.

Thick drops of rain hit the ground. The smell was hot, petrol and damp and cordite.

* * *

_November, 1941_

They were not used to such perfect, glassy skies. They could see miles out, below, above; it felt freer, but it also meant enemy planes could see them just as easily. Even as autumn became winter most days the sky was clean, palest blue. Ports were their main arena; dogfights were fierce, and Aldridge's words came back to William: this strategic scrap of earth. The land itself was scarred by Heinkels, Stukas, Macchis. Ship after ship was lost. Supply stopped, started again, trickled away and back like a river drying out.

Every day below him, in Grand Harbour or otherwise, plumes of foam were sent up by cannon fire, strafed lines of disturbed water next to billowing Navy boats. Bells and raid sirens punctuated each morning and night. Sleep might have been elusive because of the heat, but bombing too kept them awake, and William was certain the deficit would eventually catch up.

No matter where he was, it seemed fighting would always follow the same tireless pattern.

* * *

_March, 1942_

She wasn't salvageable, crumpled out of a tailspin and succumbed to an engine fire after he'd bailed, port flank ripped clean to reveal a webbed skeleton. It was a sorry mess a few miles from the sea, on clean marbled land. William knew he was lucky, and made it to Luqa with his left shoulder numb, immovable as he'd undone the parachute, pain hitting his neck with every step on uneven road.

Sun was relentless. Injury made him dizzy. He needed water.

"You idiot," Ralph said harshly when he saw him. "Do you know how long you were gone?" He took in William's ragged appearance. "Christ, Crawley," he sighed, guiding him to the shade of a supply tent and sitting him down on some spare crates. He stood unsure for a moment, hand carding his hair. He swore. After deliberation he tugged William's arm from his shirt sleeve, peeling away fabric where blood dried rust-red against the khaki. "Two hours," he said. "I was ready to write the letter." William stared at his strained face, a paler tan in the recess of his eyes, until he turned away and marched to the edge of the tent. "Medic!" he shouted.

"Didn't get the Macchi," William said.

He hadn't looked on his tail, hadn't turned before the Italian caught him. Then the world flipped itself into latitude, gravity took hold, thousands of feet becoming hundreds in a spin where elevator flaps were useless. William's throat stuck when he swallowed. A pulse radiated in his arm, fierce along his collarbone, prickling at his fingers. His hand tangled in his fallen sleeve.

Andrew Hobson ducked into the tent, pointed face gaining shadow, and Ralph took a step back to stand at the perimeter of shade and watch ground crew mill between planes.

"Ah," Hobson said after a cursory look. "No shrapnel. Dislocated shoulder, though." He smiled. "Standard rugby injury." He gently held William's arm, resting it against his stomach. "Breathe," he said, then pushed at his elbow, shoulder rolling forward, back, and William bit down on swearing, bone grinding before it found its socket. The ache switched off almost instantly, and in a lungful the air smelled of stale canvas and sand. "You'll need to rest it," Hobson said, swabbing iodine over the grazes on William's chest. "Off ops for the rest of the week."

William cautiously rotated his arm, and said sarcastically, "Cheers, Andy."

Ralph turned back to them and gave a terse smile. "You'll never get that Macchi now," he said.

* * *

He spent days in limbo. Ralph returned from each sortie irritated, jumpy. William questioned him, but he only shook his head and smoked. He had gained a new perspective and Ralph was at its centre, an embodiment of the toil William was not yet fit to endure again. He couldn't say he missed it, not the dogfights, but the plane itself he did. He was slower to think on the ground. Quicker to find emotion, memory. Eric passed through his thoughts. Hannah. In idle time he wrote two letters, one to her and one to Downton, but sent neither. What could he say that wasn't vague, or better done in person? He resolved to send Hannah a telegram next he was on leave, and to see her in London.

Finally he was cleared, and took off in a heat wave, in the cockpit of a scarred Hurricane, in the dust kicked up from the scramble. When the engine shut off with wheels firm on desert ground he realised he had been nervous; nervous it would happen again, he would be shot again, and it would be worse. The planes were a patch-up, and it felt as though they were making do until something better.

"Where are the Spits?" became a daily question.

"Soon," they were told.

Waiting. That's what his life had been the past two and a half years. Intermittent spikes of adrenaline, a good shot, feeling ancient the moment the plane shuddered back to land. Sleep was weightlessness, dreams were blank, or of home, never taking place in this dust bowl but always at the steep drop from cliffs to Channel, under a thick rain. He dreamt in altimeters and prop drones. It was not Downton his subconscious sought, though he did miss it, in an ingrained way.

"Shot that Macchi you were after," Ralph said one evening, over the glow of a kerosene lamp and horrible, bitter beer. "Tricky bastard." In the flicker of light his eyes were dark hollows, face unshaven, unkempt. The last match had been taken from the packet and he folded the empty cardboard in his fingers, flipping it from thumb to index, index to middle, middle to ring. It scraped on his nails. He had the look of the weary and unsteady; as though he had slipped, with some final action, and could not regain his place.

* * *

_April, 1942_

"It's nothing she hasn't seen before, sir," one of the ground crew said, squinting down from a stepladder next to the Hurricane's nose. The engine door was open, panels lifted away to reveal metal veins, arteries, electrics, guns dismantled atop the wing, eight men milling about in a dance that didn't seem to need instruction or interference. William touched his hand to the plane's tail, passing his fingers across the hastily painted-out identifiers of another squadron. The paint had a rough feeling, as though bristles were caught in it. There was the clatter of the cockpit being slid back, plane shuddering as one of the men lifted himself to check the instruments. William left them to their maintenance.

Rounding the tail's rudder he saw Andrew Hobson's fair head inclined in the direction of Luqa's town, Ralph leaning beside him on a beaten Land Rover. The day still held a hint of morning's coolness, though it hissed too with dark plumes, ash, the black smog moving south west. "It's worth a recon," William heard Ralph say as he neared. "Supply won't have come inland yet."

"I'd imagine they're in a bad way," Andy replied. "If we could see the blasts."

Four miles out, under the beginnings of pink dusk, Valletta had burned. Their own airfield damaged earlier that day, the city's fires had pushed smoke inland from the sea; a bright orange glow reflecting as the air thickened, an eeriness settling as the occasional Stuka siren carried towards them. He and Ralph had sat on the wing of a spare Hurricane, morbid fascination in their silence. That high-pitched scream on warm wind. Again. Again. Bombed again.

Ralph caught sight of him. He put a hand up to shield his eyes. "We'll walk in." Without opening the door, Ralph lifted himself into the passenger seat. "Crawley!" he called.

* * *

Valletta, that small peninsula of land, gone.

Slowing at its outskirts, past blue-lit fields and arid scrubland, dust settled from their tires as they were caught at an impasse of rubble. At an angle, the road was just visible beyond, continuing until a steep drop, a man-made tier along the cliff face. Andy shut off the idling engine. In the quiet ticking of it cooling down they leant with elbows on door frames, Ralph's head tilted past the windscreen, William looking between their shoulders with a straight view. It was like looking at the ruins of Persepolis, Rome, crumbled together with a savagery not of time's doing but a split second impact. The Stuka scream came back to him. Now it was silent as a mausoleum.

"It's not worth this," Andy hissed, breath caught in an incredulous laugh. Ralph jerked his door open and the car shuddered when he slammed it. They watched him pick his way over the rubble, small rock slides beneath his boots. His hands wavered either side of him in balance. Then he rounded the slope, uniform's beige blending with stone, skittered down the other side, and as he disappeared they were forced to follow.

The street opened up on the other side, but along its straight tract debris was strewn, crossing a gulf of pavement like a child carelessly tossing marbles. They walked in silence, three abreast, scanning down bleached alleyways.

"Surely the Army have come in," Andy said. "Red Cross, someone." They were coming up on a square, and as the street opened into a white expanse people began to appear, huddles and snaking lines, hushed speech.

William could feel eyes following them. His own gaze went to a mass about a parapet, young men crouched, frantic. He realised they were digging. Pulling rubble away. He imagined a person buried, a child...

Andy saw too, and he stuttered. "Jesus," he said, starting towards them. "_Jesus._"

He shouted, and a woman on the edge of the crowd looked sharply at him. Relief flooded her features; she began to wave, beckon. "_Ingliż armata_," she called behind her. Other people turned. The scrabble stopped.

"Doctor," Andy said, pointing to himself.

The woman nodded. "_Tabib_, _tabib._"

"Andrew!" Ralph's voice cut across. On what remained of the building's steps Andy stopped. Turning, his face was thunderous, the squint of his eyes hooded, shoulders rounded forward.

"We're heading back," Ralph said.

"Back?" William snapped.

Ralph's gaze was steady, seemingly unfazed. His voice was clipped. "I was wrong, boats won't have got anywhere near the harbour in this state." He looked to the scene, Andy near being engulfed by the crowd, men within digging again. "You can't help them, Hobson. You haven't got supplies."

Their shadows bent and joined as Andy pivoted back to him. William watched Ralph's head tilt up in a way he recognised; patient authority in his relaxed stance observing Andy's agitation, and for a moment William saw in him those pompous head boys he'd known at Eton, the echelons of Oxford, all that Downton's earlier age might had bred him to be. A brief disgust flared in his chest.

"He looks as though he's going to hit me," Ralph preened. "His CO. Go on."

The provocation founded a decision in Andy's face, a clenching in his jaw before he acted it out and stepped away, past them back towards the mouth of the square. They were enacting a private drama in the midst of a greater, more important destruction; their catalyst looked to lie in the unsteady cobbles beneath their feet but William couldn't be sure if perhaps it had come before, the edge of rivalry in both of the other men's eyes suggesting a prior disagreement brought out by the strain of strangers' desperation. And now they would retreat. The grate of following orders moved in Andy's long stride, one hand on the back of his neck as though to hold his head up to the broken street, to retain his pride, to apologise. Ralph walked grim beside William.

As it is wont to do, the walk back seemed far longer than when they had arrived. Again they passed alleys, shops, a turquoise-painted door that was the single colour on a street. Over hillocks of rubble, around them, imprinting their boots on the silted fringe of piles. Andy carved a path and William stalked between, sure not look back to Ralph a few feet behind. They reached the high walls of Kingsway and the stone took in their echo.

Over a final slated wall the Land Rover came into view. Each man retook his place and Andy turned the vehicle in a severe, snarling arc, joining the road to the airbase. People, families jostled roadside, an exodus from Valetta, becoming a blur that thinned as they sped past. Andy's eyes flicked in the rear view mirror. Abandonment, or guilt for it, rung high in William's throat, snagging any words of protest.

* * *

_October, 1942_

"_Vector one five zero, bandits twenty plus, angle three five._"

Over the wide, southern scoop of harbour and port, the 109 William tailed curved away from its counterparts, entering a slow dive. He banked after it, cursing as it dove steeper, coast hurtling beneath them. Where was it going? William's attempt to catch up proved futile with the long drop, and while it was still in his sights he was forced to curve down at a gentler speed, half-rolling so the engine wouldn't choke. It was a German advantage of engineering, and he wasn't about to force the plane into cutting out; he could give up, turn back, but the chase had him curious. They were well away from the centre of fighting now. There was little cloud, only wisps of condensation that were barely of consequence, and he could see the yellow cone of the Messerschmitt's propellor, her black-cross wings. He banked downward again.

At 10, 000 feet they came level. It would be easy now. Shoot it into azure water. But it swooped up, like a gull in search of a current, William slipstreaming in its exhaust, and they flipped to find his tail before he could regain even bearings again.

He felt the bullets shudder into fuselage. Through the thin tip of elliptical wing; behind the cockpit; under the belly, and he felt that hit in him, cannon shell ripping through metal and into his leg. He felt the tip of gravity dragging the plane's nose down, and it was uncontrollable then, the only option to get out. Later, he would be certain he was quick, but the plummet was quicker and he seemed sluggish in comparison, pulling the hood back to a rush of air that was nothing like as mild as on the ground. In turning his body crashed forward, chest to the lip of the cockpit. Something cracked. Hauling himself away, undamaged leg first, he managed to get onto the wing. It was his left calf, without pain yet but the hot slick of blood against his boots. If he could sit on the wing he'd be able to slide off... How close was he to the ground? Hard to judge, but it glinted fiercely. There was a horrible whine at his back, engine or the rapid movement of air, he couldn't tell. He pushed on her flank and slid, fell away from the machine.

The last he'd read the altimeter it had said 4,000 feet. Must be 2,000 now. He pulled the ripcord. It was violent, the snap, taking him under the arms and jolting his limbs before the gentle descent. He watched the Spitfire hit water at the speed of several tons, under a veil of black smoke. If he looked up all he saw were pleats of white canvas; below, an ocean disarmingly clear where it met land. A crosswind had him drifting out, and he guessed it was hundreds of feet now. He threw off his boots. He felt sharp pain again, in his arm and leg diagonal to each other, a sear across his abdomen. He shut his eyes and began counting. Wind was becoming more lateral, western.

Ten. Twenty.

Then... heaviness. Warm salt. He was in the sea.

* * *

"Tell me how it happened."

Ralph sat at his bedside, leant forward, hands on the bedspread. Behind him through the thin window was a vista that looked pristine, city and farmland untouched. William's eyes would not quite focus; light was harsh, Ralph's voice patient, and when he lifted his head his to take the water Ralph gave him his neck ached with the weight.

"I followed him straight up the coast," he said slowly. "A 109. He peeled away soon as he got a bullet into me, saw me losing height. I suppose I parachuted just offshore, because I woke up at Ta Kali. I don't know, really."

He had recollection of hitting the water, the drag of massed waterlogged canvas before he detached it; remembered the corrugated ceiling of a Nissen hut, overrun by a haze of pain. "Where are we?" he asked.

"Mtarfa," Ralph said. "Do you want the report?"

William shut his eyes to white, cracked plaster above him. "Mm."

"Fractured collarbone, three cracked ribs, shrapnel in the leg. No burns, you're lucky for that."

He tried a small laugh but it turned into a grimace as his ribs ached.

"Will," Ralph said.

Something came back to him, not Ralph's voice saying that but another that belonged on the Embankment at St. Thomas', a voice firmly from home, a voice long gone, perhaps warped by memory. William suddenly thought how odd it was, that he had been given the very picture of his own death in the plane and the sea; how he had not had a moment of resigning to it. How quickly life could confront, happen, finish for other people.

"Don't call me that," he snapped. Or maybe whispered.

Ralph's eyes widened, and he must had sounded harsher than he meant. Before he could apologise Ralph was speaking. "When we send you home," he began gently. William's eyes shut again. "Hey." Ralph shook his good arm. The light of the room fractured. "Morphine's catching up with you, mate," Ralph said, with one of his rare bright smiles. He continued. "When we send you home, it's for recovery time over Christmas. Then you're moving on to Heston."

William looked at him for a long moment without blinking, and Ralph glanced away, absently looking to the window, down the ward. "Training," William said dully.

A pause. "It is, yes."

William let out an unhappy sigh.

Ralph shifted nearer in his chair. "Look, an OTU is a welcome break," he said, back bent like he was begging, eyebrows raised and palms up. "Proper recharge."

"You're taking me off the front line," William hissed. "It's finished here and Italy's the next option. Are you saying I won't be part of that?"

"Not at first, no. I won't be either." Ralph uncomfortably ran a hand through his hair, shifted again, eyes that strange and eerie ochre, the colour of burnt summers and Maltese ground, of Whitby's cliffs. They were creased and smudged by lack of sleep, and closed for a brief flicker.

"What?" William asked.

"I go back to England, same as you." Ralph said. His mouth twisted but the gravel tone of acceptance in his voice was relieving, a shared sentiment; neither knew how to return. It had been too long. He stood up, and William listened to his footsteps leave, pause, turn and muffle until they were gone.

* * *

_November, 1942_

It was a curious thing, to long for home so fully, but upon arriving there wishing to be away again. The dreary weather of England weighed him down, held him fast to its grey, recovering streets. The muscles in his leg still felt tight. His collarbone ached. London, in comparison to Malta, was whole.

By telegram he and Hannah had agreed to meet in Green Park, a midway point between them. After the last time they had met he supposed neutral ground might be best. She had fled to Fairford that August, and the day they learned of her brother's death had been the last day he'd seen her before she left. She was expected a period of grief, he allowed none; they hadn't spoken of it, not in any correspondence. Eric's name was not mentioned. So he was nervous to see her now, nervous she would break or that he would, and that whatever security they had individually felt in moving on would fracture.

He imagined her in Fairford, stewing in that small village where everyone would know what had happened and wish to console. He might have thought she would stay at the hospital, but her mother demanded her home; perhaps for reassurance that her one remaining child was well, or to coax her father from his silent embitterment, or to share the burden of minutia that came with a death. William knew what a house in grief was like. How cavernous it could be.

From his bench he saw her round the long avenue of trees, coming from the direction of the Mall. She was not in uniform. A dark houndstooth coat engulfed her, her hair bright against it, face pinched. She walked precisely, and only saw him at a few feet away when he stood. The stayed at that distance for a moment, before she took several steps forward, hand outstretched. He had a sudden thought that to anyone observing they would, at a glance, only look like acquaintances, about to introduce and shake hands. Could they really be so cold? Fifteen months. That gap spread between them as they sat, looking between trees to the bare grass of the park, fractions of brick buildings beyond. The rush of roundabout traffic outside the Palace faintly intruded. They both spoke.

"You look – "

"Did the – "

She gave a gracious smile, nodding for him to continue. He asked if she'd been given leave. "Yes, I'm going up for Christmas. I suppose you'll go to Downton." She stared at him for a steady second, and in her stillness he saw green in her eyes he never had before. "You look different, William," she murmured.

He said nothing. They watched one another, an inventory of the other's face, and he took in the faded freckles on her skin, the set of her mouth relaxing, the edge of a flower-printed collar beneath her coat. They both returned to the each other's eyes.

"You know, I would much rather not go home," she said, turning back to the path. "Mum prattles on about what a waste it all is... Eric's potential. 'Who would shoot a clever, handsome boy like that,' she says. I just don't want to hear it again."

An elderly man moved past on a bicycle, fallen leaves cracking under his tires. He looked straight ahead, spectacled beneath his cap, and did not acknowledge them. Nearer to Piccadilly he disturbed a group of pigeons who noisily flapped into the trees. Hannah watched, amused.

"To my parents, I was only expected to marry. Marry well, and for love," she said. Her gaze stayed far down the path for a moment, and then she looked pointedly at him.

* * *

He wasn't entirely certain how they had progressed from that comment; they walked towards Lambeth in late afternoon light. Crossing St. James, through the townhouses of Birdcage, she drew closer to him, arm looped in his. Was that a precursor, a regaining of trust in touch? They cut across a green by Westminster in a conscious effort to avoid the particular stretch of Embankment between the two bridges, and away from the river the south side melded into long roads of Georgian terraces, low squat brick buildings and picture windows. It was closing in on dark when they reached her street. Treed one side, picture windows the other. The decision was to be made here, after their long trek through the city. It had been a stall, and excuse, but she had held his arm and her hip had bumped his. There was no remarkable sequence of events. Silently they tread a carpeted staircase, her flat was unlocked; two rooms cramped by dark panelling. No light was turned on until the blackout curtains were firmly shut. He watched by the door as she went about a routine, barely aware of his presence.

She crossed the room, and her lips and nose were cold as she kissed his cheek. "I do miss you," she said. He took this as a final permission. They kissed, and again it was different to the last, arms pressing around his neck. He felt sharp pain in his shoulder, and pulled away. "Sorry," he whispered. A reassuring touch of lips. "Sorry. I was just in a bit of a scrape."

Hannah's eyes were alarmed, hand hovering. "It's fine," he said. Her palm fell over the edge of his collarbone. He ducked his head and kissed the soft flesh next to her thumb. Her hand followed his jaw back up, and she was careful to hold his waist when she kissed him again. He felt the slow draw of her breathing. His hands found the low dip of her back, and her mouth curved up.

It was a moment in which they no longer had an intertwined history, but simply a shared desire, and he thought again of her taking his hand in the park. He thought of it as they reverted to nothing but touch, mouths, limbs, shed clothing. Whatever of life's trappings had kept them from this seemed far off in the moment of its happening. There was no longer a sense that they needed approval; for the first time since Oxford's spring they kissed with the purpose of beginning something else.

* * *

Morning broke cold and clouded. As they woke Hannah told him about the Cotswolds, river races, the grand church, the quiet traditions, a childhood of nineteen-twenties insular life. It was a comfort to hear about, that nook of her and Eric's lives that he had never thought to ask after. They were playing catch-up. Tragedy had set them back and now they must familiarize again, teach and learn and listen. Her fingers moved in his hair as she spoke, a tickling above his temple before her hand smoothed flat.

"Was it odd?" she asked. "Growing up at Downton?"

"Mm? No," he murmured. Under his cheek was warm cotton, the curve of her thigh. The brush of her hand over his head was hypnotising. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes to the whitened room. "I didn't know anywhere else." He rolled over and her hand fell away.

"I wanted to let you sleep," she said.

He smiled in thanks, reached up to draw the fabric of her dressing gown over her shoulder where it had fallen. His fingers brushed the inside line of her neck. "Downton won't stay untouched, you know," he said.

"Nothing has," she whispered. He felt her sigh, and with it the world threatened to rush in beside them, spoil their tranquil moment with a sun up, the city moving outside as rain wished to fill the rubbled gaps between buildings that had yet to be cleared, the foundation holes. He was so tired of seeing things fragmented.

Hannah's arm balanced across his shoulders as he turned, lips finding her jaw. "Not just now," he said, hoping it was a reassurance. "Forget it just now."

* * *

_Marry well, and for love._

Throughout the day that phrase came back to him, and it was difficult to read her. That evening she took him dancing, to a hall that could have been abandoned by the jazz age, remnants of posters tacked to the walls, old paint and dust and the twang of music through thin doors. Half-submerged from the street, it would be easy to forget the war here, if it wasn't filled with various uniforms amidst smoke and alcohol. Mostly army, though William caught sight of one or two airmen. Hannah clung to him in the snug space. She looked away every time he tried to hold her gaze, holding her head to the side so that their cheeks were near touching. Maybe it was the amount of people, but she was reluctant, shy. Eventually the crush became claustrophobic, and he led her out.

They left the hall as music soared and a new dance struck up. In the corridor's comparative shadow Hannah looked at him curiously, reaching up to resettle one of her hairpins. "Did you want to leave?" her voice placated, though he could see disappointment in the shine of her eyes, behind the youthfulness that had filled her face again. "No," he said. He leaned on the opposite wall to her. A staccato of trumpet filled the air. William took a breath, knowing he was acting restless; out with it, he thought.

"Where do we stand, Hannah?"

The previous evening had been a reconciling, his mind still on Malta's time. There was a sort of pleading in her patience, a residual grief that they hadn't had time for fifteen months earlier. They knew each other, relief, relearning, remapping. Waking, he'd thought that they were equal, that it was what they both wanted with their hands linked in sleep. But tonight there were moments she had been so infectiously unabashed, this person he did not recognise, as though her brother's uninhibited nature had translated to her. Maybe it was a welcome lightness. But then this sudden reticence; William sighed as music filtered out to them, the slow, sultry mourn of a clarinet.

"Eric said he wished he could think of the future." He crossed his arms, looking down at the floor. "And the longer I surv – I've come to terms with it. But I do think about peacetime." His gaze came level with hers and he stepped across the corridor and took her hands. "So?"

"I don't know what you're asking," she said over a confused laugh.

"Yes you do," he said gently. He leaned and kissed her, focussed only on that, her hands on the back of his shoulders, the need in her response that reminded him of the halcyon days of Oxford, that honest feeling of life in his nerves. He pulled away only slightly, nose to nose, and with his arm around her waist it was as if they were dancing again, closer than would be dared inside the smoke of the hall. Her eyes were still closed. "Will we have a future?" he asked.

"Because Eric can't?"

"Because we want to."

Her eyes opened. "I've forgotten what wanting feels like," she said. Then blushed. "Well," she amended, curving her palm over the back of his hair. She drew him closer again, kissed him sweetly, in a still way with their breath falling into a matched sync, and what drew them apart was muffled applause, laughter, then silence as the band finished its serenade.

It wasn't a definitive answer.

**tbc.**


	5. Heston

**v.**

_Now we are the masters of our fate._

* * *

_December, 1942_

England froze.

William had seen November into December, during an uncertain week in London, Hannah flitting around him. The city was busy, familiar and shelled, but tensed at night, light subterranean and no longer burning against low clouds. Aircraft gunners went out; searchlights stopped. On those still nights he dreamed of what the city might look like from the air. The stretching spokes of it, the silver twist of the river. No ambient light, only knowing it at low altitude. The Lancasters over Berlin, in their fleets. Two months. Two months, he had not flown, and he felt it, restless in his movements. Like there was a violence in him, bubbling out as frustration, and he wondered how he'd teach if he felt so twitchy, so trapped, so without freedom.

On the train to York he huddled into his greatcoat and half slept. Somewhere between Newark and Retford it began to rain, and he opened his eyes to smudging grey-green, the brown bulk of towns. Hannah's goodbye had been a kiss on the street before walking separate ways. Not emotional, no sorrow, no promises. Physically cold, emotionally certain. Her gloves on his collar. And how normal they looked, in a city used to concise farewells.

People smiled at him sweetly. The airman going home for Christmas. The sky bleached and the earth clotted with frost.

Had he missed Downton? Festivities always had an air of being forced, at least when he was young, for the children's sakes. Continuing as before, though they would not remember _before_.They'd forgone the shoot years ago, when his grandpapa died, and coming back to the estate William was glad of it. He did not relish the idea of traipsing over cold ground with a shotgun, if he ever had; it was still a shock to realise that he was the one in charge of these decisions. How superfluous it all seemed now. How utterly ridiculous, in the face of all they confronted, and yet it was a part of being home, those staid and steady traditions. There would be holly, and candles, and a tree, which he smiled at the thought of. Even mass had an appeal it never had before, or perhaps just the peaceful church, its quiet corners and echoing vaults.

He had seen men turn to religion. It seemed like a natural instinct, in the face of fear, to wish to be beneath a power not your own.

* * *

Mary chose red, a colour she hadn't worn in years, a dress of mid-thirties bias and silk. It was sumptuous in this era of rationing, but she liked its fluidity, its set against old diamonds and silver. It felt powerful and sleek and like she was far in the past, between wars and before deaths. It was a dress for an important evening, and this one felt weighty, the light bracketed through the staircase's leaded windows already pale.

She missed William. She often thought she had realised her love too late, always at too far a distance. It had been there in the moments before her father's shadow had crossed the hospital room door, before his words had shattered her. Those moments when she truly believed in the myth of motherhood, the joy and relief encompassed by the weight in her arms. Gone so quickly, difficult to regain. Even now she was unsure, unsure of their reaction to each other, and this time he had been away such a long time.

Crossing the gallery she watched William, cheek to his grandmama's, bag at his feet. She felt her stomach drop. _Safe, whole, alive. _He saw her as he straightened and raised his hand in greeting. The hall's glassed ceiling filtered an unforgiving afternoon light, and he was thin under it, cheekbones at sharp angles beneath tan, freckled skin.

"Mama, you look wonderful," he said when she reached the bottom of the stairs.

"And you look..." Mary could not say just how William looked to her. Wear and grit, in grey slate blue. His hair still soft and his eyes still crinkling at their corners. Looking at him, others saw her and she reflexively saw Matthew. But here, in the twist of his mouth, were her old portraits shadowing across his face. They were in the dark gloss of his hair. In hands clasped together. Posture, poise, a calm, cool mask of assurance. All she had taught. "You look very fine," she said.

"I suppose I should change," he sighed, stooping to collect his bag. "Grandmama says Sybbie and Leon are here."

"They arrived yesterday."

Her mother had left them silently, and Mary caught his hand as he straightened, caught his face finally unguarded. They stood with hands linked for a long moment. _Say that you are well_, she tilted her head at him. He shook his head and his gaze slid away. His fingers contracted then let go.

_Not now_, his lowered eyes said._ 'Well' is too small, too vague a word, and I cannot lie._

* * *

"You're different around him," Sybbie said. The drawing room had calmed from her exuberant greeting of William, was now in a lull of pungent alcohol and low light. How pretty she looked, Mary admired, how settled, in a coral dress and her hair clipped away, how reminiscent of Sybil at twenty-two.

"Am I?" Mary asked, feigning innocence. Sybbie tilted her head a fraction and Mary's facade cracked, expression falling as she sat next to her niece. "He's changed."

The both looked across the room to where William and Leon stood in front of the fireplace, dark tailcoats, twinned height, Leon glancing at them over William's shoulder. Then the two were laughing, smiles against their glasses; a twitch of Sybbie's mouth echoed them. It was as Mary had hoped they would be as adults: sparkling, vibrant, not like the hollow man she'd seen that afternoon. William had cleaned up and he didn't look as gaunt, but nonetheless his eyes flickered and there was tension in his grip.

She had feared for him as a child. Feared losing him, even just by way his growing up. Feared for his climbing trees and his love of horse riding, hide and seek, his trailing Sybbie. Feared that none of it was stable, that his childhood would shatter too soon. When had he grown, at what space between smiling and a dark frown had he become so veiled? It had happened before the war. It had come in increments, dates of death and modernity and independence. Watching this sleek, hawkish figure she felt both affinity and foreignness, yet she loved him fiercely, always. Leon looked so bright and open next to him. _My prince is there still_, she prayed.

Sybbie spoke. "Don't let him lock himself away," she said, and Mary saw that she feared too, as an older sister would. Mary reached and held her hand. Barrow announced dinner and William pivoted cleanly, quick to assume his role, taking Isobel's arm to lead the family out of the room.

* * *

Sybbie watched her cousin through dinner. She saw he hated to be at the head of the table, what had always been their grandpapa's place. It was a galley of faces that looked down the white cloth towards him, so as the first course finished she directed conversation.

"Leon's nephew is enamoured with the Spitfire."

She knew immediately she had said the wrong thing. William visibly sharpened, his cutlery freezing, and he looked up with a fixed smile. She lay a hand on Leon's forearm to stop him picking up the thread she had unravelled, but he was already speaking.

"He wears his father's old rugby cap and pretends he's flying, bless him," he said, smiling. "Does a remarkably good impression of the engine sound."

"And you've heard a low flypast, have you?"

"William," Mary said warningly.

"Well how would he know, he's not fighting," He looked pointedly at Leon. "Why isn't he fighting?"

Silence spread thickly across the room. In its interim Sybbie felt yesterday's exhaustion creep up: the long drive, the loathed midnight shift before it, barely sleeping with cyphers and algorithms in her head. Street lamps through the window and their bed too narrow, Leon's long body wrapped around hers in its instinctive stretch of sleep. His face was pointed next to her, jaw tensing. She wanted to put her hand on the back of his neck to calm him, or calm herself.

"I have to know mathematics as well," William continued. His shoulders hitched up as he leaned forward. "Perhaps I just wasn't in the right place for _recruitment_, though it's clever that they got to you before the War Office could."

Sybbie had so rarely seen William angry. The anger of a boy was quite apart from that of an adult, anyhow. This had power and wit behind it. His vowels crystallized, his consonants snapped between teeth that bore a loose sneer. Years ago Nanny Fox had forced her insistence on elocution, poetry recitations; a Victorian childhood that Sybbie couldn't reconcile with this moment. "Stop it," she whispered.

"Syb, it's all right," Leon said. "Will's come off a long tour, he's probably sick of speaking about it." He smiled tightly.

"Your powers of observation are astounding," William said.

Sybbie saw that to William, Leon was another past person, another provocation. A slight, gentle man, the mathematician at Keble, no older than twenty-four. Her husband, whom she felt protective of, but who laid his hand over hers when he sensed she was about to interject. It forced her to take a breath, and she sat back. She watched her aunt's eyes glint obsidian. She watched her father twist his napkin. Leon faced William head on and lines were drawn; this was an understanding between the young, a separate generation's quarrel that none of their parents would involve themselves in. They could have no sway anymore. Their children were grown and married and fighting their own war, and so they let the scene play out.

"We're all cogs in a wheel," Leon told him. "There is a difference between home front and front line."

"No," William said, picking at the tablecloth. "We're puppets."

* * *

"You've no right to be so damn inconsiderate."

He stopped at the sound of Sybbie's voice, high with emotion. Of course he couldn't escape. Even in a house as huge as this, it felt at times that there were no hiding places. He turned, to where she was defiant, following him into the gold light of the stair's alcove, at the door to the servant's stairwell. She frowned. "I thought you liked him."

Her face was pale, round, tensed with something that looked close to crying. Reasonable, open-hearted Sybbie, with her flare of temper, whose tears he had never seen. He reached out for her hand, which she took slowly. He said, "I do like him. It's just – to me it feels as if he's sitting idle." Sybbie shook her head. "But if you can't say, then I suppose I'm being unfair."

"We're busy. It's important work. Will you believe that?"

William looked at her muddy grey eyes, and nodded. She leaned next to him, shoulder touching his arm. "Are there a lot of friends, who go?"

"Don't be patronising, please," he sighed.

"It's concern, you idiot."

He smirked, then drew serious again. "Can't dwell on it," he said. He rubbed at the dip below his eyebrows, a gritted feeling passing over his eyes. He tilted his head against wood, angled up to the vaulted stairwell and the shadow in latticed windows and tapestry. "It's odd," he said. "It just catches you, being home. You want to forget the rest of it ever happening."

_Don't let it take you over, Will_. But he was taken over, so fixed within the rituals of flight, so perfectly versed in its second nature, and yet in a month's time he was to leave it. He felt Sybbie link her arm through his, her head fall to his shoulder for a brief moment. "I'll apologise," he said. He spread his tanned hands in front of him, under starched white cuffs and cufflinks. Calloused palms; the mark of work, of age. Age. He did not feel wise.

* * *

Mary could not pretend she wasn't angry with him.

Here he was, the blue-blood in blue, sick of being treasured. All was blue with him: blue eyes, blue wool, blue mood. Two years ago there had been evacuated children at the top of the staircase, kicking up dust in the nursery, giddy with that Christmas, easy with their affection. William was never that. It was a restraint of their class – to not hold, to not nurture, to have these measured moments with your children. So here William was, in war's turmoil, and Mary did nothing. There he was, a crying baby, and she'd done nothing. Here he was in photographs: grinning next to a tall blond boy. On horseback. In New York at ten. At Cranwell in '39, proud of his newly earned wings. And here he was three years later, in white tie, twenty-one. _I am a reluctant mother_, she thought. _I want this war over, just for you_.

"What was that?" she said, once he'd edged into the library and shut the door.

He laughed, covered his face then spread his palms in a shrug of defeat. "I've rallied, Mama," he said.

At the turning of summer to autumn of 1929, with the world under the crush of economics and a general election Mary could vote in, Sybbie and Tom had gone to Ireland. The frenzy before they left: Sybbie practising Irish, '_dia duit, did I get it right, Da?'_ And after: William without his spark, in the sun too long, those three months the only time he was clingy. His height at a mark well above her hip as she'd looked at his bones and thought _he'll be tall; don't all mothers wish their boys to be tall, and strong, and kind? What else are those joints and that smile to become? _

How quickly he'd rallied, seeing the car pull up the drive in an October fog, and tugging at Carson's sleeve. The house had been full, then, with Granny still, and Carson, and Papa.

"From what?"

He tipped his head back on the red velvet. She watched him blink at the ceiling as he spoke, eyes flicking like he was counting its tiles. "Oh... sleep deprivation, death, injury, sunburn, boredom," he said with faked lightness.

"Now is the time you give me straight answers," she hissed.

His eyes shut. "I'm going a little mad." He spoke distractedly, quickly, before he stopped and tipped his fingers to his mouth, turning his profile from her, and she saw it smudged back at them in the black glass. "I'm grounded in England for the time being. There's a new wave of pilots to be trained. So you'll see more of me, I promise."

She tilted her head. Promises, she'd learned, were dangerous. They stayed silent and he curved into himself, jacket bracing over his shoulders. The pretty child became the handsome man, but always with a flint in him, his Irish colouring, his pianist's hands. She was proud that she could pick out these things, itemize what had changed: smudging freckles, or he never held his mouth in that tilt, or his eyes used to have a happier curve. His hair still fell to his forehead. She had heard stories of how these boys were marred, and refused to believe he could be one of them. He couldn't be burned until his fine bones showed through, nor shot so his elegance went. She watched his long eyelashes meet the indent of his cheek. He had a beautiful way of settling his face, hands steepled, and it would be too cruel for that saintliness to be taken.

"Did I ever tell you about Hannah Brayburn?" he asked softly.

She frowned. "I remember an Eric Brayburn from Oxford." He flinched at the name, a small blink, a tight breath. "You have a photograph with him from your rowing."

"Yes." He curved further, pushing his ribcage in and his spine out. It twisted out his words. "He died. In Africa."

She slid closer, reached to touch his shoulder. "It's all right," he said quickly. "And Hannah, his sister, she's MTC in London now, but since Oxford we've... been courting." He let out a long, reluctant breath and turned to face her. "You're smiling."

It was the adolescence returning in him, the shy angle of his eyes that told her this was important, and she had to cover the overwhelming surge of love she felt at his reticence, to frame his face and kiss his forehead. "You never said," she whispered. It was the word, _courting. _She imagined a strong-willed girl, a girl who could quite possibly hold the weight of that thought jarred her, because somehow she kept forgetting it was all on him now. Did he know she admired him, for taking on so much? He looked up at her with his expectant eyes and his bowed mouth and his curl of hair.

"I wanted to be certain."

Here he was, living and honest. "Then be sure to ask her properly," she said. Funny, that out of millions of words spoken, those same few returned to her.

* * *

_January, 1943_

The land flattened and from the bare-treed road there were glimpses of it, down the slightest of inclines, twinned white buildings and the looped corrugation of hangar roofs. Ralph turned the car onto a long pale drive. They were stopped by a striped barricade, a soldier with a rifle slung over his back leaning to the window. Another man waved them through. The drive ended in a cluster of buildings, spreading behind hedgerow, and beyond the airfield lay outer London.

Inside, the group captain looked at them grudgingly. He was in his thirties, a head shorter than they were, passing disinterestedly through their papers. He smoked at a desk with typewriter and telephone shoved aside. They way he flicked his cigarette ash was thoughtful, not looking at them once.

"Tangmere during 1940?" he asked in a low drawl.

"Yes, sir," Ralph answered.

They were tucked in an alcove of a long room which seemed to span the building's whole centre; it was a spine with dual purposes, their side administration, and back towards where they had come in was a large mapping table, up against the windows. The captain's voice returned above the shrill of telephones. "And how was the Siege, would you say?"

William shifted his gaze to the bent head. "Malta was firmly grateful for our being there, sir."

He finally looked up. "Despite having the guts bombed out of them."

Ralph gave a tense smile.

"Right," the captain said. He stood and shook their hands. "Flight Lieutenant, Flying Officer... good... tour through, set up your quarters, briefing is tomorrow at 07:00."

* * *

In dusk's bruised light the hangar doors hung wide, halogen light thrown on an angled Spitfire with scaffold up its side, panels lifted away to reveal brownings and a cylinder of stripped engine. It looked vulnerable like this, mechanics crouched above and below, on stepladders, peeling through metal and grease like organs in an operating theatre.

"They're just going to be kids, aren't they?" Ralph said, stopping to watch. "Trainees, on the best bloody plane we've got."

It was nearly dark now, and Ralph leaned in the lit doorway, tilting his head out to look at the sky. Women in coveralls milled about under the high clank of tools; a wrench hit the ground with a clatter, footsteps rattling down a stepladder after it.

"Is this one either of yours?"

They both turned to the voice, a woman looking at them from where she was ducking under the wing. "No, we just arrived today," Ralph said.

She glanced between them with intelligent eyes, a green that looked grey in white lighting. "Same squadron?" She had a broad, mid-country accent, a slight lilt that put her home county near the Welsh border, and dark, curled hair beneath a turban. A smear of petrol crossed her cheek. Her pretty, high features drew up as she smiled at the two of them. She wiped the grease from her hands.

"249."

"Coastal boys," she remarked. She twisted the rag in her hands and looked down, picking apart its torn fabric. Her voice took on a wistful tone. "I love the sea."

"Don't you have to lock up for blackout?" William asked.

She looked to the plane, an elegant twist over her shoulder, to its bulk being turned and pushed backwards into the hangar. "We're behind schedule. This one took an emergency stop nose first."

"Christ," Ralph said. "Sorry."

She gave him a reproachful look. "I'm praying you know your way with a Spit much better," she said, smiling at him. Ralph inclined his head, a play at being humble.

Ralph had never made mention of a girl in Kent; his life pre-war was not shared. He likely saw no reason to speak about things that could not be regained. But they were formative, as Downton might be in William's bones, and Ralph needed a matching of minds. He could not find himself alone with that brain of his, it would loop round itself and destroy him. He was smiling, a great toothed smile William had never seen, but was handsome; Ralph, with his dark features, was easy to take on a gloomy countenance. With his wide viking cheekbones and animal eyes. William edged away, idly followed a crack of grass in the asphalt, hands in his pockets. The night was clean and clear. In a moment or two Ralph walked back to him. His stride buoyed him up. The light behind him narrowed to a point as the doors rattled shut, then he was a black shadow before William's eyes adjusted.

"What's her name, then?"

"Yvonne."

"She's after you."

Ralph shoved him gently, so he staggered across the lane, laughing.

* * *

"This is a thousand horsepower machine, you treat it with respect."

Ralph's voice strained above the rain that pelted them, their circle under tarpaulin, the musk of wet sheepskin and wool in the dense air. "You know your formations; you check your RT before take-off. Don't worry if the prop takes a minute, her joints don't like to sit idle in the cold." He scanned across the handful of men in front of him. "In a scramble situation, ground crew will have started your plane before you've got to her."

They had been through diagrams, ground checks, singular sorties, but now each pilot must fly as he would in combat: he and his plane, run after run. They would double back on the coast. "Do not go over the water," Ralph warned. "I don't care if you want to see France, it's a fool's move, especially in this weather." He nodded his head in dismissal. "Best of luck."

Most of them were barely nineteen, a pack of dark jackets and yellow lifebelts. They jostled each other, then fanned out to their planes. "Do you remember being like that?" Ralph asked.

William squinted out across the grass. "I remember being in a lot more of a rush."

Ralph laughed.

The engines started up, lurching forward on sodden soil. "Taxi in formation," he muttered.

William watched four take off smoothly, and felt a dip of pride in his chest. Eight. Twelve. "Their first ops will probably be escorts. American bombers," he said, glancing at where Ralph still had his head tilted to the mottled sky. "Not too testing."

Ralph straightened and turned back towards the dispersal huts. He tucked his jacket around his neck. "They'll be made or marred, eventually," he said, stepping into the rain.

* * *

_March, 1943_

Two hours. Two hours since the sweep, and it was the waiting that pained, glancing at a board that didn't change. Imagining all the possibilities of how it could. He drummed his fingers in a haphazard rhythm. There was a streak of movement past the window, and William jumped up. He followed out of the huts and towards the main building, wind buffeting against his quick pace.

"Ralph." William jogged to keep up with his long stride. "Ralph," he said again as they ducked into the navigation room. "Still nothing?"

He knew what it meant, but as his heart pounded he needed to be told, needed the authority of Ralph's gravel voice to affirm the loss. Ralph said, "Hastings has something."

He rounded the other side of the mapping table, so infuriatingly calm and neat, dark hair in its perfect wave. He studied the lip of Kent for a long moment. "One bloody 88," he finally muttered. His hands went behind his back, eyes kept down. "The coordinates..." he said shortly. "Calais. There."

"Sir." A young woman stood from her desk.

William pulled his shoulders back and took a deep breath. "Yes?"

"A gunner at Hastings saw two Spitfires go in the water just off the promenade. One damaged, one with black tracing... no report on the Junkers."

"They didn't radio?"

"Control didn't get a signal."

Ralph shook his head. "If they weren't shot, fuel will have went." He sighed and leaned heavily on the edge of the table. He traced a line up to the Thames estuary before glancing back to where William hovered. His eyes flicked to the doorway, dark, uneasy. "Tell the others, will you?" William nodded and left.

The moment he was away from people, in the yawning courtyard, nausea found him. Couldn't dying have been far off here? Outside there was sun, in a distant patch of weak golden light above drizzle. William stared straight at that haze until his eyes stung, and his gut wrenched. The planes were hunkered down, covered. He rounded the dispersal hut to its camouflage-netted wall and clung there, past the huddle of white chairs pooled with water and a worn cricket bat against the siding; he vomited next to the ground crew lorries and spat into the grass, his throat raw with sick.

James Hale was one. He didn't know the other. He had taught James Hale, stood on the wing and directed him through instruments and avionics, watched him taxi and take the runway like it was smooth glass. Instinct was what he couldn't learn, but the boy had returned from his test flight with that same stunned look every new pilot had, stripping off his mouthpiece and grinning. A working-class Norfolk boy, one of the ones who had dreamt of flying. It wasn't a grim reality for him, not yet. He was in love with it. God, and William had to tell them all that now...

Ralph looked so worn, under his clean facade; William supposed they were all like that. They were all wearing out. He felt thin. Threadbare. What had they been told about exhaustion? _Next thing you're apathetic, and Jerry can smell that on your wings. _Had that been it? Were Hale and this other boy too tired, they hadn't seen it?

His stomach heaved again and he clutched at the lorry's side mirror as his body bent. He swiped his hair back where it was stringing wet over his forehead. He spat, acidic. When he walked back inside, men were laughing over a board game. The sky had yet to break.

* * *

"Would you look at the face on you."

William opened his eyes to the scuffing of feet. A pair of boots tossed next to the stove. He saw Ralph slumped in the deck chair opposite him, his gaze unblinking, arms folded. Otherwise the dispersal hut was empty.

"I'm fine," William said, straightening up. He leaned forward and scrubbed at his face.

"You told them?"

"Mm, course I did." He shut his eyes again.

"It's more than just Hale, isn't it," Ralph sighed. "Come on. Pub." He swiped his boots up and pulled them on. His movements were quick, fluid, contented. It was strange, seeing his friend so rejuvenated, and William was almost wary of it, slow to stand and follow him to the door. He blinked heavily with the bright sunshine, the smell of damp burning off. "What's happened?" he asked, letting his weight fall from step to ground as Ralph pivoted away.

Spring was building and Ralph only gave that small smile again; in the lowering sun there were midges flying at the outlines of him, tiny transparent wings. He was like an older brother William could never quite catch up to, moving ahead of him on a dust path through the grass and the foxgloves, and there was the church spire over his head above the trees, his neck bowed to it, hands in his pockets. He was an enigmatic soul. He was not an open book. William was akin to his emotional distance. They were silent the whole walk, but it was a silence void of any emotional tension. It was as though today had not happened, forgotten already; like they had become expert at cutting away grief.

The pub was low and monochrome, perpendicular to the road's staggering shale buildings. There was a gloom inside more befitting to his mood. Slats on the ceiling and white plaster, boxed window seats. The landlady was elderly and sweet. "My son's a Navy lad," she told them. Her eyes were wide and hopeful behind spectacles. Her hands knotted with arthritis on the tabs. "He's seeing ever so much of the world."

* * *

"Five years, and you haven't asked her." Ralph's face was slack with surprise.

William passed a hand through his hair and sat back. "Not – not in any sort of formal way." He sighed. "All this preoccupation, it's – " It was what? He had a ring. His mother had given it to him his last night at Downton, her eyes wistful. _I still have his wedding band, _she'd said. It was the diamond he'd admired on her left hand as a child, the catch of light in it, and he'd barely wanted to accept taking it from her. She'd shaken her head, mouth pursing and eyes closing in that way she had when emotional, her cool palms pressing his hand closed. The ring sat in the inner pocket of his uniform, a piece of wealth and memory.

"We'll make a deal," Ralph interrupted. "I speak to Evie, you bloody ask Hannah to marry you. Or I'll shoot you for cowardice."

William smiled at him across the table. "Evie now, is she?"

That half-smile again. "Shake on it."

William took his hand.

By the second round they were in a more maudlin mood. Ralph smoked another cigarette, and they were without track of time, the day's end filtering through the windows. They would be walking back in blackout. Ralph slouched. His elbows propped on the narrow edges of the table, and he tilted the ashtray with his hand, glass indents under his fingers, eyes down.

"You know, you're charmed, Will," he said. "All your family at that big house." The ashtray grated on the table. "My grandparents are stuck in Norway." He spoke precisely. "Dad too." He took a drag and looked up with coal eyes. "German occupied Norway."

"What?"

He shrugged. "Mum's an English girl, we anglicised the name."

William was disbelieving. "German occ – Jesus, Ralph."

"I could've gone up there, in 1940." He gave a loud, brash laugh, single-noted. "Which homeland do I defend, hm?"

He looked so small, then. So small and sorry, shoulders levelling out and his head in his hands. It was a final defeat. It was the day crashing down, then prying open of his worries. William looked away from the fall of his features, the gauntness hollowing there. He put out the cigarette. "I want one decision that's just mine, now, because I haven't been selfish in four years."

They followed the chain of command. They both knew it, that the only selfishness they could have under other's orders was in the singular moment of dying; the instinct of self-preservation. But Ralph had been through the cycle so many times that he was at the point of wanting a future, and William could see it reeling out in him, a thread laddering through fabric. He was on the last loops of a spool, he had been since Malta, and that jittery resignation in returning home, that need of its comfort but also a refusal of all its trappings, had finally morphed into a resolve for action.

They were restless and grounded, and how much longer could the whole thing go on?

* * *

_June 1943_

_Do we have a future_. There were moments, giddy, honest moments, where even in this bomb-scarred place living seemed possible, a happiness, naivety or youth having not quite left him. How could that be, after so much? In her flat, William stretched his hands across the countertop as Hannah stood at the window, their space separated by a doorway and a small table, a flower vase atop it. The cheery yellow distracted him from the drably wallpapered room, the stale smell of cigarettes, the tepid slice of air that pushed through the sash windows.

"This isn't really how I imagined it turning out," he said, a laugh caught low in his lungs.

"No." She didn't turn from staring down at the street. "None of it."

"I meant – "

"I know," she snapped. The kettle screeched behind him, and she moved swiftly to it, not pouring it, just shifting it off the stove and turning the element off. She turned around and put her hand to his cheek. "But..." she said.

He stared at her silently, feeling her cool palm smooth across his jaw.

"... your head's always up there." Her gaze moved to the window behind him, to the sky. "Always keeping an eye out."

He had never felt it, that a room could be such a void between them, but as he watched her shoulders bow and her head follow, hand cover her mouth, he felt the cold open up, freeze him, glacial. He wanted to cross the crevasse, and even though they were already touching he felt detached, and he knew with sudden force that she was right. He wasn't here.

His hands held her arms. She let out a breath then bit her lip, his palms shifting as she stepped closer, her own fingers grazing the silver-winged embroidery over his heart. He kept his eyes on her face, its paleness. He felt her hand curl on his chest. Then she was hitting him, a sting against his sternum, and he staggered back surprised, trying to catch her wrists.

"I hate this bloody – fucking – uniform," she shouted. She was crying in an angry way he wasn't sure she even noticed, her breath clotting in her throat. "You're asking me to marry you, William," she said. "And I worry every day. I think, 'if he's injured – properly injured – will I recognise him? Will what's physically different or gone matter to me?' Because if it matters than that means I don't truly..." She stopped herself and hung back defeated, the two of them now several feet apart, hands dropping back to their sides.

She twisted her sleeves in her hands. "I don't know."

"I'll be all right," he said fiercely.

She shook her head, hair falling loose along her forehead, mouth a red slash under taut white cheeks. "You're not invincible," she said, clutching her cardigan around her. "How can you not understand that yet?"

The OTU post had ended and Ralph had gone north, while William's own weeks had become continental escorts next to American bombers. His Spit was tiny beside their drab starred bulk, dwarfed in their shadow. He had felt nothing near to invincible these past days. Across the Channel and back, a sentry guard. One coast looked just like the other and he couldn't fathom the water as a demarcation line. It all felt like sitting still, waiting for the next big bombardment.

Hannah came close again, gentler, hands shaking. She pulled at his tunic buttons until its belt stopped her. Then she reached to loosen his tie, shirt, and he couldn't react, couldn't make sense of how suddenly her emotions had changed, what she wanted. Her hand slipped beneath to his undershirt and curled there, just below his collarbone. "I hurt you," she whispered, gaze to her thumb moving across the freckles on his skin. It fractured him, a pit in his stomach, and he gathered her up, her arm collapsing to his chest as his rounded her shoulders. There was some comfort in their matched height, the enveloping feeling of her slightness next to his; a sense of protectiveness but also equal stature, knowing she wanted him to be so when her spine was loose like that, head bent and breath glancing the underside of his jaw. It was a relief to be able to read what he couldn't moments before. It meant that pieces of him, too, were still recognisable.

Her kiss was messy with the salt of tears. Beyond its corners her mouth was dry, lip caught between his, and she was rough with emotion. This time the tunic belt did not deter her. She fumbled, pulled away to look down, and for a beat he balanced his cheek to her hairline before she was directing him again, his shirt all undone, her hands skimming up his body. In this, she was always in control. He was tired of fighting, and he let his spine loosen. He let himself be guided. He let her kiss him with all the bruising roughness she wanted, before he returned another more gently. Just now he knew gentleness would frustrate her. She tugged on his collar. He took a sharp breath, their noses caught sidelong, mouths hanging millimetres from touching, and her cardigan caught in his fingers and his palm drew a wide circle across her back.

"Honourable," she said. He felt his breath do a strange hiccup that might have been a laugh, like something switching, and he could feel a chair digging into his back, feel her weight change as she lifted herself and he had to support her. One arm under and the other around her. His neck craned to see her face. And he thought, remembered in that still moment, being a boy carried on Tom's shoulders: seeing only sky, the fringe of trees, from that near six foot height. Hannah leaned, and her hair was a veil. They were alight. They burned. They were breath in a silent room. Maybe it was all right.

But it was so much energy. It took so much energy he didn't have. She sapped it, from his skin and her limbs bound around him. Maybe they had become pure mechanics, had reverted past memory's bond to cerebral instinct. But no, because she could be volatile, was angry with him, and if that wasn't out of love than what was it? In her he saw love ran close to grief, equidistant until the two caught and converged. He was that point. Beyond him it was a single, messy line.

And then she said what he had wished, but never expected. She braced her hands against his shoulders to look him in the eye. "Yes."

**tbc**


	6. Italy

**vi**

_let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead._

* * *

_July, 1943_

Five.

It was the fifth tank William had passed, a Panzer with its tracks fallen to the lip of the road; it was aflame, in a whoosh akin to the lighting of a gas stove – the angry yellow, dirty flame of stagnant petrol, not clean and blue. Up ahead were a group of Americans, flanking their jeeps in neat lines of helmet after helmet. In snatches of wind he heard their voices. They were so clean, these men who had jumped from the sky, singing through their cigarettes and squinting past the tree line. Staring at them he couldn't imagine being a soldier. Ground combat, from what he had seen, all its rawness in the past few hours, was graft work over lines drawn up and patches of territory, a slow crawl of triumph or defeat. In the air the lines evaporated, were gridded below. Armies became a mass of seething, coordinated limbs; the jaded switched out for the younger, though the jaded fought better. This dirt path curving its way coastal from Licata was full of the jaded, khaki against sand spraying up from their boots. Grey ships hunkered in too-blue Italian sea. Jeeps were directed from the mouths of carriers, amphibious for twenty feet of surf until their tread marked the beach.

He, too, had parachuted from the sky.

Shoved alongside infantry Wehrmacht soldiers marched, dirty and grey POWs. One officer walked with his head held proud, eyes sunken over the strong point of his cheekbones. Half his collar torn away: stiff black and embroidered silver bars. A flash of red tucked between the second and third button of his tunic, a ribbon directed away from his heart that said 'shoot me here'; it said 'I have a girl back home and a mother, who both said _ich liebe dich_ and sent me on my way'. Berlin was bombed. The had lost Africa and the Eastern Front was slipping. But looking at this man's pocketed eyes as they passed, William could not bring himself to say 'Kraut bastard' as the echoing yell behind him did.

In the first wave from Malta to Sicily, at midnight he had drifted with a crosswind. The dark shadow of bombers followed, and he landed past Eighth's line, in scrub at the top of the beach. An orange haze fell on the ocean's horizon, and the clatter of gunfire was far off. He heard a measured thunk of equipment as voices ran up behind him. He stayed down, braced in the grass. What confronted him, in a low crouching rustle, were standard issue lace-ups, a parachute harness, a netted helmet over flashing eyes.

"You get off-course too?" an American accent asked.

He looked into the dirt-streaked face of a paratrooper. "I'm meant to be at Comiso," he said, dragging his parachute towards him and balling the cloth in his hands.

"We saw your Hurricane go down before we jumped."

William nodded out to glinting, choppy sea. He squinted up at a hazy roar overhead. "Not much ground resistance but there are gunners."

"You got a sidearm?"

As he stood he felt its weight pull on the lanyard around his neck, shifting in his tunic pocket underneath layers of jacket and lifebelt. "A Webley," he said.

The trooper nodded. "If we're both heading east we'd better meet up with 505 soon." He dragged William over and down dunes, to a dirt-track road that was empty as light flashed from the town burning beyond them.

They turned right and walked.

With a grey dawn the landscape took more distinct shape: a boulevard of trees to their left, uneven rock walls that reminded William of England, the smell of salt and smoke. In and out, guns and explosions swelled. They passed abandoned vehicles, burnt out shells of metal, and both bowed their heads when passing bodies. William watched ochre earth coating the toes of his boots. The paratrooper talked, of his home in the Colorado foothills, of his brothers stationed in England, the Pacific. He had a cigarette, he had a lighter. His voice was the metre to which their pace sustained itself.

"Now you – " He took off his helmet and scrubbed at sweaty hair. Held by its netting, like fingers hooked through crochet, he let the helmet swing at his side. Every pendulum ended in a flash of white, a streak of scuffed paint on the metal's back, a single line, a dash on a roadway. " – aren't all you Royal Air Force types picked out by the King himself?" He had a high, giggling child's laugh.

William smiled with what felt like patient restraint. "We're by no means elite."

"I don't know, seems you saved all our asses around '40."

"I defended my island, that's all."

The trooper tipped his head, inquisitively. "Huh," he said.

They didn't talk again. A sign said Gela; the Allied snarl of planes pulsed overhead. The amphibious invasion had begun, and they were bound to find soldiers soon. Over the dunes, through the towns, on this curve inland of smoke-filled track. William glanced up at exhaust lines in the sky, tipping on his heels, like the children who watched dogfights back home.

The trooper nudged him. Looking back to the road from the sky's brilliance stood a patch of woodland, thicket moving low to the earth, cracking with voices. "Not German," he whispered. Beyond the trees' gloom the ground glowed again, vehicles at its clipped corner. They paused. The paratrooper shifted his rifle in his hands. And then he began to run, an awkward gait kicking dirt behind him, and the road opened into lines of men, jeeps, tanks. Dust and song. Waving.

"Cobb! Where've you been?"

They pulled him into the back of a transport truck, between ribs of metal meant for an absent canvas covering. He was clapped on the shoulder, sat amidst twenty-odd smiling men. "When we start shooting at Krauts you keep your head down," one of them said.

In the scarred town, the Americans shouted. They were in loud, directive clusters. They had confidence that was grating, and talked of having slipped easily up the beachhead, past coils of barbed wire and city rubble. It was their friendliness that was dangerous, their kinship to themselves. An open heart soon filled with the muck of many days on the move; it beat in time with your boots.

* * *

Past the road, over the rail line, another dirt track turned north. The first William saw of the road to Comiso's airfield was a swarm of ground crew amidst sprawling fields of grapevine. His feet stuck in the leather of his shoes, then slid loose as he jogged, feeling sweat down his spine. The day boiled. The sea an azure horizon behind them, they walked on flat plain, packs slung across their shoulders. William weaved up along the shoulder of the road. He recognised a white-blond head at the front of the group, flashing silver in the light. "Laurence!" he yelled.

The head turned. Held a hand up to shield his eyes. "Jesus, Crawley, have you been fighting them bare-handed?"

William dodged into the march and fell into stride. "Not with a bunch of paratroopers in front of me," he said. He took a breath of muggy air. "The heat's hell."

They reached camp with the last bright lines of sundown. They sat in the shade of a truck's tarpaulin, hauled over a long table in the midst of olive yards. Planes docked low in the almond groves, engines still warmed, propellors barely stilled, a neat zig-zag of angled wings to a purpling sky.

"I was in with the Spits over the beachhead," Laurence said, spinning a bottle of water across the wooden table. "Aeronautica's given up. Where'd you walk from?"

"We were blown off-course and shot at Licata, so I hiked with Seventh Army to Vittoria." William scrubbed his hands over his face, reached for the water, then reeled away before he could drink. "The more pertinent question," he said, setting it down, "is where did you get vodka?"

Laurence shrugged. "Can't invade without spirit in your blood." He nonchalantly lit a cigarette. He glowed in twilight, a blur of white spindled hands and the oblong of his face. Somehow it was a sad image, all these shadows filtered by the eye's poor night vision. Laurence Firth was like a shadow of Eric. A lighter shade of blond, a thin sombre face, silt green eyes. It would become evident the locals thought him sweet, _bambino_, invited him into their russet-roofed homes, gave food, lemon, olive, tomato. Around them he had endearing shyness and self-deprecation; charmed with halting Italian and blushed when they laughed at his Mancunian accent.

But by the end of the first month of sorties he was the most eager to forget it, to drink the bitter local alcohol, laugh about home. Mornings had him rise at first light, restless tension in his pacing through the airfield as a wavering spectre in the edging heat. Others called him a greyhound for his build, and he raced, focussed, flew. Resilience was a state partly taught; Laurence had trained himself into both precision and abandon, and eventually, the exhaustive pattern would have to end.

* * *

_September, 1943_

And then, the mainland.

They flashed over choppy water, the mass of Sicily. The ocean was a heaving, breathing void, churned with artillery. With a formation spread wide above the slow chug of frigates, the sea closed in on tawny land and the guns began. Over Salerno the air fleet divided: they banked right as Americans moved up the west flank. Some might cross to the country's toe at Messina; others at the harbour of Tartano, all pushing for Naples, Rome. Parachutes fell against the snap of gunners. Under his own engine William could hear Junkers hum in the distance, and below the spray and smoke of explosions he could feel a reverberation under his wings, the flutter of a 109 swarm's straight-edged silhouettes hovering before them.

Under his mask, William let out a long, slow breath. It was a record skipping in the groove, waiting static, each battle a jump to sound. Again, again, again.

He had cabled Ralph before his mother with the news, two short telegrams sent south-west and north. To Ralph, a conciliatory: _you were right, but you're on the hook to be best man._ To his mother a wry: _I've asked properly, and well, it seems I won't be returning your ring._

Hannah marvelled at it. The diamond sat high on her left hand, heavy and slender and catching on the run of her fingers through his hair. It was a permission to constantly touch him, until July dawned and he was swept again into the Mediterranean.

William turned twenty-two after bombs had rained on the capital, after Italy had surrendered, over the smoke of hit naval ships, the oxbow of a river winding like the Thames. The promise followed him, followed everyone, that troops would be in Rome by summer.

The open city.

* * *

_January, 1944_

"Cassino?"

"Patrolling Gustav," Laurence said.

William ground his cigarette below his boot. "What's wrong with a P-47?"

"Because they're behind the line at Anzio." Laurence held up his hands. "That's all I know."

This was relayed at the edge of Naples' tumble to the sea; above black smoke offshore, their own cigarette smoke lingering above their heads, warming them in the only month where they needed greatcoats. Cassino would be a stalemate. It would be bombed to shreds. Without communication between ground and air, it would be white rubble and blue sky reflected in stagnant water.

"Well," William said, staring at the flat grey horizon. "Another early morning, then."

* * *

_May, 1944_

Venafro was a place of mountains, where sunsets tinted their peaks red russet brown and he inevitably thought of home. Of the girl he hadn't seen in a year, the soft weight of hands, of her way of speaking. He had never been needy, never wanted for anything, except in certain people's absences. In quiet moments this feeling was pure and nostalgic and put a tightness in his chest that made him think his lungs may not fill. But he was on a downward curve. His nerves had dulled in arid air. Flying was his first love here, simply by default of being his first focus. He was in a plane greedy for oxygen, ascending to heights that held it thinly, but together they were like a climber up Everest, twenty-nine thousand feet, returning to the soup of sky that was base camp. For four months, the rumbles of Cassino had reverberated through the valleys. No day was still.

Hannah's letters had trickled throughout '43 and into '44. He re-read them crouched in the shade of a plane's wing, waiting for his recons, thin clouds scuttling over the town pressed up against the foothills. He read once, twice, slower as the words became memorised.

August: _this is the month I think of Eric most_.

September: _you are twenty-two, Will! The wireless doesn't tell us much, but they say there are troops on the Italian mainland now. _

December: _home for Christmas and I miss Eric's boisterous renditions of carols, Mum shushing him in church. They're building an airfield here in Fairford, did I say? _

April: _how much longer do you think this damnable thing will last?_

* * *

_June 5, 1944_

Fifth Army hit Rome. The streets clogged with crowds, infantry, berets, vehicles. Khaki and blue and metal-shining skulls. William had never seen so many people, frenetic stretches of pavement amongst the ancient monuments and the new, scarred stone. A patter of hands touched him, in the path cleared behind a jeep. Arms looped and jarred their progress. Kisses were pressed to his cheeks. Laurence laughed awkwardly as a woman reached up and kissed him full on the mouth; he stepped away blushing, walked a few feet, then looked back. "Don't make a show of it," William muttered. Their procession was slowing, thinned as the Altare loomed, crowds curving into its steps.

"Keep moving!" came a yell above the cheering. Under a low awning, one of the soldiers in the back of transport truck had stood and ripped down a flag from the balcony, and red balled in his hands, shook out to the white circle, its swastika.

Troops were rowdy; a throng of Americans swarmed steps, statues, as a bank of columns rose behind them. They sang, William couldn't hear what. A paratrooper hugged him. His collar smelled of sweat and vehicle grease, the vague burn of corroded metal. His hands left black imprints on William's sleeves. But he smiled like a kid, ran up to pace with the tank that barrelled next to them, and everyone continued forth.

At Trevi's square soldiers bent and splashed their faces in the fountain. "S'posed to make a wish, not bathe in the damn thing!" one of them shouted. Italians pressed coins into their hands, spun them to toss over their shoulders, gestured to shut their eyes with wishes. Each would hope for similar things, with silver lira tarnished in grubby palms: to cross the continent or the Atlantic and know it was safe soil you were treading on.

They made track from Naples to Rome to Perugia. Within a week the flimsy mail plane had landed again, and Hannah's voice returned, solemn: _St. Thomas' has had an influx from France. The beaches. It's grim, even with field hospital clean-ups. I took one whole bomber crew in; seven burnt men and their fighter escort, who funnily enough recognised my name and said he knew you. Dark haired, Anderson? Less scathed, very kind and helpful, despite shrapnel across half his torso. He had a haunted face. He looked like he missed you, too._

* * *

_May 2, 1945_

"Il Duce is dead, Führer's dead – can we fucking go home now?" Laurence said.

Two days since shots had rung through a Berlin bunker; several hours since the Soviets had hoisted their flags over the Reichstag. While they were static in a city of many steps, while troops flooded Florence, the Germans were pushed into the Alps, and finally, finally, it all looked to be over.

Nothing in Perugia changed. They walked through levels of light, in a town that seemed abandoned, pink and white and shuttered, high-walled. The American division that was left was idle, wandering the bullet-nicked alleyways and battleground streets they had fought through to remain here. So the commotion they found at the base of a winding hill was almost welcomed. It had a frenetic energy as they neared, an animal smell. It had the rot of leaked innards, mechanical or human. It was magnetic.

Up close, fuselage looked different; it had a scent, a metal bite like blood, but cold. Petrol stained the ground, dark, thick, rainbow pools. Paratroopers stood around a shell of a building, assumed bombed, of course bombed, a plane side-angled into the rubble. The tail end of a Heinkel. Swastika painted diagonal to the rudder.

"You hearing a voice in there?" one of them asked. He looked around at the group of four men huddled next to him. "Yell something in German; who knows German?"

Another glanced over his shoulder. "Flyboys are here, let them do it," he muttered.

William met his eyes. The strain in his face showed up harsh lines and a pout, a squint, grimacing at the sun. He couldn't place his accent. Eastern seaboard. "You would've shot at 'em anyway," the soldier said, stepping aside. He turned his back and William paused. He sensed Laurence watching from a distance as he stepped up onto chunks of fallen building, a mountain of brick that tunnelled crudely to the wreckage.

It was warm with sun. It smelled sulphurous, long body creaking as it settled closer to the ground. William made a circuit of it while the troopers looked on. He kept his eyes to the riveted metal, scarred and charring at its edges.

Then, with a cascade of rubble underfoot, scattering against the plane's belly, he heard a voice.

_Fuck._

Where the body had skittered on the ground metal was shorn away, skeleton revealed; it was such a flimsy thing, such a mess of ribs, and behind its caging he could see a mass of grey uniform, moving, struggling up, a writhe of limbs, hands, a drag of dead weight. Eyes.

_Fuck._

He lay a hand on the flank and crouched down. Viewing it this way he saw there would be no angle at which to get the man out – a man who was barely breathing, with a shine of sweat on his face, greasing his hair. His gaze was still. His jaw worked, but he didn't speak, and farther into the shadows William saw his legs were trapped beneath a concave, the plane's skeleton dented in atop his kneecaps, wires and rock pressing in. He had twisted himself at the torso, was half-leant on his elbows to face the outside world. He lifted his hand, what looked like a wave, then the loose shape of a pistol, and blew air out between his teeth. He kept his eyes steady on William's. "_Bruch._"he said. William knew snatches of German. He knew the words of death and mercy could be outlined with _ja_ and _nein_ and _bitte_. The man opened a cracked mouth and there was a wet, bubbling sound, like his lungs were stuck together within his chest. "Emil," he said. "_Mein vornamen_."

He had a kind, round, young face. It was stretched thin with pain, and William wondered why he was telling him his name, why form a bond now? Validate yourself for God? He glanced back at the ring of paratroopers that seemed to shrink in the distance as his vision tunnelled. "_Ich bin... _Wilhelm," he said.

The pilot nodded. "Wilhelm. _Danke._"

William's Webley was secure in his boot. He reached for it, knew every move was watched, the decision already made, he just had to stand and fire and make sure it was only once. The others had decency to be silent, watching him stare at this man within the belly of his plane. They were blind to it, but William could see panic in the rise of his chest, his face flat, hands braced against the earth. He had wide, brown, child's eyes, and he was nodding. _Stay still._

William saw the paratroopers standing across the street. He saw Laurence leaned up against a wall, feet askew, staring at the sky. He saw the jagged walls above him. _Still! _This was to be his last action of the war. Feeling a bullet click from the cylinder, hearing the crack, closing his eyes. The deflated sound of the fall six feet away. Looking back up at the world, its colourful tiered street unchanged, and seeing Laurence take a long pull from a stolen bottle. Indifference there. Or simply the low-lid gaze of a drunk.

He climbed back to the street, wanted to toss the gun away, shove it into Laurence's trembling hands, but he paused and crouched and he tucked it back into the side of his boot. He felt heaviness with each left step, like penance.

* * *

God or drink. Saints or sinners. None of them were either, but standing in a church he felt close enough to the former. Laurence had clearly already chosen the latter. In a side aisle, rows of candles burned for the dead. Red and blue and yellow, green, white. William ducked past the nave, turning his hat in his hands, tucking it under one arm as he lifted a stick and held it to a flame. You were meant to pay, say a prayer. Genuflect. He passed the flame to a wick in its green glass holder, and watched wax melt as it ignited.

"You're not Catholic, are you?" Laurence asked, standing near the altar, watching William shake out the flame and turn back across the polished floor to a pew.

"I'm C of E," William said, sitting down. He leaned forward and tipped his head in his hands. _You're a heathen._

Sitting pushed exhaustion through him. He could sleep, if it weren't for the guilt roiling in his chest. He could curl into this pew, feel that peculiar sense of his skeleton where his skin was thinnest against the chair's backing. It was silent in here. The light was dusted and saints stared from the ceiling, in their gold-leaf skies. He could sleep if it weren't for guilt. If his feet weren't so heavy. If Laurence wasn't standing in the gaping bomb rubble of the choir, halfway up the steps, haloed and head tipped to the light.

"Singing," he said.

"What?"

Laurence held up a hand. "Outside."

A faint murmur of male voices reached them. It grew, in and out, a rambled, made-up tune, cheers interspersed.

"You don't think they've – "

"I don't know," William snapped, standing dizzy, moving past and tugging at the doors, light stinging over him. The square was too bright, cobbles and fountain white next to the brittle lines of buildings beyond. He took a step to descend the stairs but found his back jolting against the church's riveted doors instead. The sky was silver. And Laurence was laughing.

Soldiers milled around the fountain, black figures on its edge, the dry scum of water residue lining their backs. One of them reached out and wiped at the marble lip. Then the scene was tipped violently sideways as Laurence grabbed William and bowed his body against his shoulder, arm looped fast. "Wake up," Laurence said, shaking him. "Jerry's surrendered."

William grimaced and elbowed at his ribs. "Get off!" He twisted away.

"Why aren't you smiling?" Laurence asked, squinting. He held a hand up to his eyes. "_Sir_."

William straightened his tunic and took a sharp breath. He wouldn't dare believe it, for fear it had not actually come to fruition. What evidence did he have to think it had? He had shot a man and he was either numb with ruin or numb with acceptance. Was surrender unconditional? Was it across Europe? Did London know yet? No member of the congregation noticed them, and he descended the stairs with his weight loose, falling almost. He strode right when he reached the cobbles. Laurence loitered behind him, movement slurred with the residue of an hour's alcohol, tripping down the steps. William's impatience flared, feeling like he was managing a child. "Hurry up, Firth," he said. "No time for celebration."

* * *

It was true, and William felt nothing. Italy's heat broke, light fading into a muddy yellow, then pink. He and Laurence sat at the edge of camp, and he took a minute to realise that Laurence had spoken.

"What is it you miss, Crawley?"

William glanced up through the patterned leaves to an arid sky. "Rain."

"It's odd, knowing Berlin's fallen."

"Mm." William shut his eyes, felt stone rough under his hands. "I can't imagine what London will be like."

"You know anyone there?"

"An aunt." _A fianc__ée__. God knows where Ralph is now. _"Last I heard there were rockets."

A bright spot flared at his periphery as Laurence dragged on a cigarette. "The thing is, we're to go back, and we're to be celebrated," he said. "I don't want to be notable. Do you?"

His eyes glittered in the half-light. The smell of smoke was warm and sweet. William shook his head.

Laurence shifted, eyes to the ground as he frowned. "London will be full of cheering and I can imagine it, a sort of happiness in it for a moment, but once we get to the end of that street full of people we'll see what the city is now: the shelled buildings, the children back from the countryside. Shops will still have rations; windows blackout curtains; pavement sandbags."

His voice changed pitch as he tilted his head up, staring out at the bruising dusk. "It'll all have to be dismantled, and then what? I can't dismantle my head, can I? I'll shut my eyes anywhere and still think I'm flying." William watched his hands shake. "We're to return to where everything is ours, but we won't be _us._"

"You're wise when you're not on a bender, you know," William said.

Laurence shrugged elegantly. "I'm an old soul."

England was a saturated place that seemed more foreign to them now than the landscape they gazed out at. They had left their imprint here, in the black hulk of planes behind them next to lean trees, in their camp between vineyards and almond groves.

But they were going home. God, that word.

"So what are we calling it?" Laurence asked. His mouth curled up, voice full of faux grandeur. "This 'momentous day'?"

William stood and turned back to the airfield. Canvas snapped and muddy figures milled about, stretched thin and hazy in the dark. Voices murmured in the distance: ground crew and their torches, but beyond that it was still, a silence that made his head buzz with trying to focus on its vastness. He said: "I've no idea."

* * *

_May 10, 1945_

The tide was out on the Thames.

And the skyline had changed.

Clapham was as William remembered it, as he knocked tentatively on Hannah's door, red paint peeling away against brick, the front step worn. He looked down the row, to a child shouting at the apex of the street, feet pattering loudly on pavement. Sun filtered behind the boy's head, and he was reminded of painted chapels, cool stone and shadow, long haloed faces garishly exposed amongst rubble with a hand pointing to the gap of sky as culprit.

The door opened and jarred him, eyes snapping back to where Hannah stood with her hand against the jamb. Her eyes blinked and then widened. He smiled, because that was what people did in these situations, wasn't it? When they saw a girl they hadn't for two years, when the war was over. Because he had a freedom to smile now. It was done with and he was home. The thought opened up a gap that wasn't just here in this present moment on a Clapham street but within him, a realisation that there would be no more flights to go back to, and he suddenly felt useless for having come at all. The skin of his face was tight; when he relaxed his mouth it felt like it was cracking.

Hannah pulled the door wider and stepped back, inviting him in. It shut and they were in the gloom of a shared entranceway, carpet smelling of dust and damp and the odd sulphur of powdered eggs. There was a wireless on somewhere; piano drowned by a lorry trundling past, its faint scent of petrol comforting him. "I'm upstairs," Hannah said.

"Yes."

She turned and started up the steps, and he only saw now that she was in a dressing gown, stockings, her hand faint against the banister. Her nails were lacquered red, and on the landing she curled them into her palms self-consciously.

When he reached out she touched his arm and slid away, a small, almost patronizing smile on her face. He wanted to hug her; she would not let him. The gap widened to swallow him as he thought of the mistake he'd made. "You're late for VE Day," Hannah said, moving swiftly to the kitchen. She picked up a cigarette that wasn't lit from the ashtray on a small window-side table and flicked it in her fingers. He looked at her nails again. She crossed her arms, elbow propped up, and the gesture made him want to cross the room and hold her.

"There's still bunting on the shops fronts," he said, tentative at the possibility of their old banter returning. She gave him a pointed, kindly look. He did not yet feel comfortable enough to remove his jacket, the shrug of sheepskin over his tunic; he was cold anyhow, not reacclimatized to the gloom of England. Hannah laughed.

"You look so lost."

He held his hands out at his sides, a shrug, not knowing how to respond.

"You owe me a dance, you know," she said. "Three days ago there was so much dancing... It made me miss you quite horribly." And air rushed through the gap, a feeling buoyed in him he couldn't place. She was touching him, hands under his jacket collar, at the nape of his neck. "You're tanned," she murmured, thumb light on his jaw. Her face was near and when she kissed him it was with the confidence of knowing him, how he would react, her mouth open and still against his until he inhaled and she stepped closer. She felt thinner, or perhaps it was just the thin cloth around her body, but his hand pressed between her shoulder blades and hers did the same between his.

They were skirting the issue. That he had noticed she wasn't wearing the ring, that it was all pretend.

It felt like an ending. Not just the literal, the outside world, the war, but _them_. They were holding the other as if afraid of truly touching but willing to be held, like strangers bound in a common purpose; like the estranged people they had become. Their relationship's natural evolution had run its course or died en route to Italy, and now he could feel twenty-four months manifested in her non-committal grip. It was in the urgency with which she'd kissed him, that inability to go back.

Her fingers played along his collar. "I can't marry you, William," she said close to his ear.

Her fingers lifted, one two three, palm. He'd lost all naive hope, and reality lay as a hazy horizon before him. "I know that," he returned, sweetly, like she had done no wrong. Here was the bittersweet moment suspended and what was beyond it; like Laurence had said, the cheering people and the end of the street. It was his restlessness he knew she couldn't live with. And it was all right.

"If I were just an aristocrat?"

"You introduced yourself without it."

"So it didn't matter?"

She shook her head. "Eric was the promising one, wasn't he?" she said. "You remind me of that. Oxford, before."

He had felt, at a point during the war, perhaps during Britain's defence, that he had climbed to the mountain's peak, and what he surveyed below could not match where he was at that moment. The only way he could understand her cryptic refusal was to think of it in those same terms, that Oxford had been a high stage which wasn't again to be reached. It was a vicious cycle, all reminders, and he didn't know who was at fault.

"Okay."

Hannah's eyes darted across his. "Eric introduced us, he approved, he... I only knew you through him, do you see?" she explained. "How well can one happy year set two people up for six unhappy ones?"

She had always been fatalistic, hadn't she? He narrowed his eyes, though it seemed the right view – they might have been a chance meeting on the Isis, might have crossed paths on Oxford's streets. Never cohesive. They were tangled in the way of sex before love, premature and meaning nothing beyond the primal, love constructed later, forced at because being without it during war could outline a fate within itself: make a person futile, easily killed. "Not well," he said to the floorboards.

Her shoulders hemmed up. "You won't fight me," she said tightly.

Frustrated laughter bubbled in him, and he yelled. "Do you not think I've had enough of it!"

She stared at him with sharp surprise at the volume of his outburst. It seemed to make her decision. She turned from the room without a word. He didn't watch, heard her rifling in a cabinet, the snap of a lid, velvet pressing mirror pressing wood.

"I'm sorry," he said when she returned to the room. Two years apart had made them efficient. He expected her to hand the ring to him, but she came closer than that, tucking it into the breast pocket of his tunic. He stared straight ahead. She re-did the button.

"We protected each other," she said.

He stepped back at an odd angle, her head curved slightly away, and then he pivoted around her, and left with as neat a posture as he could, heart clunking, as she followed him to hang at the door.

His footfalls padded on the stairs, and her lock clicked quietly shut. He let the front door clatter, clamping out the radio's drawl.

He walked towards Vauxhall with evening closing in; realised it felt wrong, intrusive, without blackout curtains. The city was artificially bright. He could see in people's homes, lives – dinners, dances, children, chatter – framed by windows of stone. He was the unobserved in the street, the man in the bomber jacket skirting rubble and thinking of hailing a taxi but wanting the smog air to clear his head. With war's end came both community and its fracture. London was a place for families and hollow men, and here, in a metropolis coming back to life, he felt as cold as he would if he were thousands of feet above it all.

* * *

The war had been over nine days and he had yet to wear civilian clothes. Boots and badges. Past York the land glowed in a way he couldn't remember, like there was residual light from Italy in his eyes. Out the window were the station's succession of green pillars, white clapboard, the platform already filling with those alighting his train. The brakes screeched. Steam hissed at him to leave. Getting out of that carriage felt disembodied: gathering his bags, sliding the compartment door shut, following the narrow mahogany corridor to a porter standing aside, having to duck through the doorway, the platform a long frenetic strip of cement. Someone in army greens sat next to an elderly man on a station bench and took his hand, another in naval blacks scooped up a running child. How incredible, for some people to so quickly revert to an old relationship's dynamic. He scanned for a face he recognised. All of them under sooty air, that gritted smell that was entirely England's and had no burn to it. No rough tang of blood and cordite.

His mother stood at the end of the platform, a blue hat with pheasant plume, her face turned away from his direction. As he walked he realised how tightly he was holding his shoulders: holding himself at parade. Pivoting his feet.

"Mama, you didn't have to come," he said when he reached her.

She started, eyes wide to his. "Tom drove me," she said, voice not as he remembered it, wavering. Her gaze travelled across his shoulders, then back to his face. Her head tilted. "Are you well, darling?

She had a caution about her, as though she had been told to be wary, like he was an animal not to be spooked. She stared at him for a long unblinking minute, and he was certain his face cracked in the same way hers did, pursed lips and crinkled eyes. He let his bag drop. The train dragged behind him, leaving again. How to explain so much? He could feel his body collapsing, every heartbeat pushing a word, a fragment, away from cognition. Her gloved fingers touched his cheek. _No. _He shook under her arms. _No. _Felt the pressed velvet of her hat beneath his jaw, her head turned out against his shoulder. Grief hid within relief. He could shut his eyes now. _Shut your eyes_. He could breathe. _I can't_. He was not the same._ You will learn._

* * *

Three hours, and already William had disappeared again. He had said he would change, and come to the library. That drive home: his steady gaze out the window, a triumvirate glance from left to right to sky, Tom telling her to sit in the front with a flick of his eyes, seeing William's white clasp of his hands mirroring her own. She had been advised to let him be, but that meant she had imagined it, his physical presence, and fear plunged through her chest. It was so long. She must catch up.

Up the dark wood staircase, past the tapestries, down the red-carpet corridor, Mary found him in the peace of her old sitting room. It was a comfort, the writing desk in the corner, brocade curtains, settee by the fireplace. Boots propped by the low table. A dark head resting on the arm. William had folded himself into the cushions, in braces and shirtsleeves and socked feet, face gone of its lines of tension. He looked like the child who used to curl up here; who had watched the fire, who was narrow-boned and worried. She leaned over the arm and put her palm against his hair, hesitated, kissed its fine curl over his forehead. Sun had lightened its edges to a warm flaxen brown. "My prince," she whispered, drawing away.

She sat carefully, listened to the dull tick of the clock outside the door. She gathered his tunic from its heap on the table, folded it in her hands, smoothed down the edge of the pockets, and in one felt an outline of metal. She found her engagement ring there, fallen to the stitching's corner by a diamond's weight, and she held it in her hand, surprised. Wondered just what had gone wrong. His telegram... she had hoped, in some fraction, that he might come out of all this settled. _I won't be returning your ring_. It was typical youthfulness, to assume certainty. Here he was, and she had not spoken to him properly yet, had not protected him or warned him that time, waiting, could... She leaned forward and put her hand over her mouth.

"Did you say something?" came his murmur. She looked to see his head craned against the settee's arm, cheek pressed into it, eyes lifted to meet hers. They flicked down to what she was holding.

"Oh darling, I'm sorry," she said. Was she apologising for prying, or rejection, or having given him the ring in the first place?

William sat up. "No need, Mama."

In the gold light she stared at him with pitying eyes. He blinked heavily, arms braced either side of him, lifting his shoulders into a defensive line. "It was too long an amount of time," he said. She reached and touched his cheek with the back of her cool fingers. His head was still hot with sleep. "I'm not as cut up about it as you expect me to be," he sighed. "There are other things to focus on." He rubbed at his eyes. "The estate, for one," he said from behind his palms.

She smiled gently. "Don't worry about that yet."

"I need to distract myself," he said frankly. He looked down at the ground, toes curled into the carpet. Two years had left no boy in his appearance; she could see a tan line beneath his wristwatch, his face high relief and angles. She stood, and he did the same on instinct. She took his hands between them. She gave her best encouraging smile.

Mothers hugged their sons. Mothers cried, and cherished, and feared. And she had done all these things, quietly and stoically, or did them now, with her chest lacing up. There was something loving in his curving to her height, as though she had never expected he would grow into a sturdy and hale human being. There was something strange in feeling his breath expand through his back. Strange in knowing he was alive, in front of her, and not miles across the continent as the wireless gave an abbreviated version of events. His arm crushed her shoulders. He shifted and kissed her cheek, and she blindly touched the edge of his collar. _Sweet boy, you deserve the world._

"I didn't mean to wake you, coming in here," she said, meeting his eyes. "Only, a letter arrived for you."

"Who from?"

She frowned. "I believe Barrow said 'Anderson'. A couple."

* * *

It was a small Tudor house, an expanse of brick and plaster around dark timber, set in the wilds of Kentish countryside but close enough to hear the sea's roar. In this idyll it only made sense they was an easy smile on Ralph's face, its bright gleam making him look youthful again; fair isle and shirtsleeves, a wristwatch and a ring, the uniform of contentment.

The woman beside him was a head shorter and even darker haired than him, a face that William only vaguely remembered. They curved closely in the way of newlyweds, always touching, their arms looped together. It was simple. It was so starkly simple, this girl with green eyes that Ralph had married, that he had built a life with. It was too simple to be jealous of.

"You kept that quiet," William said, when they were alone on the drive, rounding the house past ancient oaks to the back meadows. The front was ordered Elizabethan garden; towards the harsh salt air it grew more barren up to the cliffs. There was rock rose in bright sunlight. There were crickets under a muggy sky. The earth was gold, pink, blue, such a change from Italy's burnish and London's smoke. It was clean here. It was centuries old but felt new.

Ralph looked after Evie, where she had gone inside the house. "Three months after D-Day," he said softly. "I'd have married her three years ago if the war had let up. Then we got tired of waiting."

He was walking in a tilting, pocketed way, feet shushing through high grass. The stayed quiet until the sea air gusted through and the ground turned to dunes, sharp drops further east along the coast. It wasn't the height that made William uneasy, it was the Channel, the bare mirage of France, its glinting surface. _Doesn't it bother you?_ he wanted to ask. _Doesn't it bother you, the amount of names we can rattle off under that ocean?_ But Ralph had always been pragmatic, and William had learnt the same. The water shifted with a hush, Ralph's gaze swept east to west, a squint and a set jaw, and his hands left his pockets to cross against his arms.

"So. Normandy."

Ralph raised his eyebrows. "They carted me home with shell-shock. 'Lacking moral fibre'. What a load of tosh."

"And since?"

"Desk work. Pottering about like I'm already seventy." He smiled, then his eyes cooled. "I suppose you had a battering that last year. Monte Cassino and all."

"Mm."

A pause, the sea-sound stretching between them.

"What'll you do?" William asked.

Ralph glanced sideways at him. "God knows." The sky was bright edged, a reservation in his face caught under it. "Go back to where I was before the war. The RCM wants to take me back on – teaching. There's talk of a concert. If the orchestra's still alive, and I can remember how to play a violin after six years."

William smiled.

"I want simplicity, Will." Ralph closed his eyes. He seemed cushioned by his own words for a moment, their syllabic comfort, like he was imagining children in these orchard trees, on the beach with pebbles and sand in their palms, a boy named for no reminders, not Ian or James or Scott. Then he straightened and turned in the grass, headed back into the heavy shadow the house threw towards them. "You'll stay?" he asked, a few paces ahead.

"I'll see you in London."

In August of 1945, in Kensington, in front of the gold-glow spire of Albert memorial, a woman would walk through the muggy day with a newspaper rolled in her hand, the convex of its front page spelling 'VJ Day'. In the white arch of the Royal College's concert hall the sky would turn navy in half-moon windows. Three days apart, two atomic bombs would have been dropped. And one week later a continent away, Bach would serenade_, _each stepped series of violin notes, each silent face. The scale would go higher, shadow hit as the stage glowed. Norway would be burnt and liberated and snowed in; Ralph would never know. The next series begun. And there would be Evie, beaming behind the lights, proud of this easily transferred mathematical mind, precision and beauty. Another step.

"Dreary," Ralph quipped. He stopped and looked at William with proper earnestness. "I suppose we're rubbing your face in it a bit, aren't we."

"No. No," William was quick to say. He waved off Ralph's concern, though it was a raw feeling in his stomach, at being put back into that flat, leaving it, Hannah's sorry eyes and lingering hand on the door. "I just need to get home."

Ralph would turn thirty years old on the last day of Potsdam, and onstage he would be small and black tied and tailed; more belonging there than he ever was next to a Spitfire. The concert played would be the one postponed since the August of his twenty-fourth, and he would remember every bow, legato and jeté. Would be all steady eyes and measured hands. Leading the cues. It had a power to eat you from the inside, music; an ancient communal bond, it could consume a whole life. Under such weight, the thunder of applause might never seem enough, but it would be. In a cracked city and a broken Europe, it was something honest. Clean. Alive.

But now, in the no-man's land between sea and garden, on the coastal Roman path, Ralph looked at him with wise, warm eyes. "Then go back to Downton," he said. "Be king of your castle."

Those words had the punch of an order, but the tone of a friend.

**end.**


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